The Psychological and Philosophical Debate on Racial Profiling

The Psychological and Philosophical Debate on Racial Profiling

On the 20^th of April, 2021, the former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin (45), who was video recorded kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over 9 minutes, was found guilty on three charges and convicted. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree manslaughter, third-degree murder, and second-degree unintentional murder. The jurors deliberated for over 10 hours, for two days, prior to making this decision. The court’s decision was a major victory for the Black Lives Matter movement as well as for Blacks living in the US who face racial discrimination from institutions such as law enforcement.

Racial profiling is a deeply troubling and long-standing problem in the US despite the US claiming it has entered the post-racial era (Glaser, 2015). Racial profiling takes place every day in towns and cities across the country where private security and law enforcement target persons of color for often frightening and humiliating interrogations, detentions, and searches with no evidence of any criminal activity and which are based on perceived religion, national origin, ethnicity, and race (Glaser, 2015). This paper will discuss racial profiling from a philosophical and psychological perspective.

Philosophical Aspect of Racial Profiling

The philosophical approaches to racial profiling tend to operate while always detached from actual practice by the police, and this is especially true for ‘statistical discrimination,’ to racial approach. The reason is straightforward; one does not need a philosophical analysis in protesting racism and police brutality. Most philosophers assume that racial profiling is justified if it is in line with bodily integrity and dignity and equality and freedom of the racial minorities and majorities (Taylor, 2013). Therefore, they are only philosophically interested in the justification or lack of justification on the assumption that this is a practice that is not intrinsically humiliating, demeaning, or brutal and has no particular use for curtailing crime. Nonetheless, these philosophers work at a degree of abstraction, such as Kaspar Lippert-Rasmussen, Arthur Applbaum, Richard Zeckhauser, and Mathias Risse are clearly aware of and were concerned by societies’ racial injustice (Taylor, 2013). These philosophers assume explicitly that racial profiling, as practiced currently, is inconsistent with justice. However, what they want to know is whether existing racial practices currently which are unfair and unjust mean that all racial profiling forms must then be unjust. These are interested in the fact that a racist past, as shown by history and whose consequences are still present in the present-day injustices and racial inequalities, is enough to determine that all racial profiling forms are unjust. Therefore, even when the profiling abstracts from police brutality and from the deliberate mistreatment and humiliation of minorities by law enforcement, it is assumed that the interest in racial profiling is based in the context of societies similar to contemporary democracies (in contemporary democracies,  political equality formal commitments coexist with a significant level of freedom constraints and also constraints on equality of people). This is a result of the tolerated and sometimes mandated laws of racial discrimination in the recent past (Taylor, 2013).

Racial profiling is a method for preventing crime and detecting the same that the police use and which takes into account racial discrimination in selecting and investigating suspects (Birzer, 2012). Law enforcement is generally unconcerned with the identity of persons but instead is concerned with the race of the suspect. Indeed, for all purposes and intentions, racial profiling uses the morphology and color of skin, as opposed to a person’s subjective sense of self, as the main determinants of making a decision to stop a person and proceed to search the person. Hence, racial profiling can be defined as the action initiated by the police that relies on national origin, ethnicity, or race and not just the individual’s behavior; one focusing on pre-emptive and preventive profiling as opposed to profiling on crime only (Brizer, 2012). The latter focuses on the narrowing down of the suspects’ pool necessary in identifying the known crime’s perpetrator; the former is an effort at identifying persons who can potentially commit a crime such as smuggling weapons or drugs, whether they have actually engaged in the crime or not such as purchasing the illegal weapons to commit the crime. Racial profiling that is preemptive is controversial because there is yet to be any crime committed and because race plays a big part in the decision to intervene. Police tactics based on preemptive assumptions, for example, the ‘stop and search’ or the ‘stop and frisk’ raise concerns that unless the actions that are to be prevented are few in number and described carefully, the prevention efforts against crime continue to undermine the principle where there is no evidence of the liberties and rights of others being under threat (Brizer, 2012). The racial profiling dimension makes the concerns more accurate, and hence, pre-emption and race are the twin factors that are behind the philosophical and political controversy regarding racial profiling.

Psychological Aspect of Racial Profiling

Regarding racism, very few people would argue against right and wrong. With the exception of people who are extremists, there is no one person who would endorse racism because racism is rather obviously wrong. Yet clarity on the best response and not just the confidence about whether people have the courage to appropriately respond is lacking (Harris, 2017).

It may come as a surprise to many that not all people would accept the topic of racism through a moral psychology perspective or in any form of moral terms (Alexander & Schwarzschild, 2013). For example, there are those who would assert that racism is basically political. Racism, when manifested, is society’s hierarchy’s expression and a means by which an elite or dominant group tries to maintain its social and economic power. Referring to racism in any different terms would apparently be an indication of missing the point. Meanwhile, they are those who would opine that speaking on racism rather than discrimination and prejudice involves repudiation that is unjust to one’s fellow society members. One may call out racist behavior or actions but ought to refrain from referring to someone as a racist. This suggests that the latter is a form of condemnation of one’s moral character, which supposedly positions one beyond a civilized society’s pale.

This idea that calling a person a racist is a crime against their fellow society members is a skewed logic. At its optimal, there is pedantic concern by avoiding the word ‘racist.’ In the worst-case scenario, there is a disconcerting view about this idea: why should society be apologetic when it calls out on racism and be labeled as morally bad bears no logic. Society, for example, does not trouble itself into making fine distinctions between a theft and a thief. Society will unapologetically call out a thief for the actions of stealing.  It should not be any different when it comes to a racist who exhibits racist behavior (Delgado, 2018).

To be clear, there is something moral about racism because it involves the way one person treats another. When racism occurs, the social standing of the other person or a group is compromised. Racism and racial profiling hurt the well-being and freedom of the target. Any society that seeks to eliminate racism will be interested in promoting certain dispositions among its members, that is, fairness, respect, decency, and tolerance (Vera Sanchez & Rosenbaum, 2011).

Conclusion of the Matter

Often times calling out racism is viewed as a moral crime in comparison to racism perpetration. People who speak out against racism and racial profiling are viewed as being grievance politics purveyors, as though targets of racism revel in victimhood. Additionally, moral blindness is seen where those inclined to regard racism complaints as identity politics do not understand one thing: those on the receiving end of racism. The racist experience is not an excuse for posturing politically, but rather, it is a racist experience that diminishes and wounds the target’s quality of life. Targets of racism would rather that it did not happen at all and never talked about.

In itself, the legacy of racism is insufficient to show that racial profiling is not just because racial profiling is not inherently racist. However, the racism legacy affects the weight that can be ascribed to the burdens and benefits of a police policy and depends on the way that the distribution of these occurs across social groups. Therefore, while racial profiling is justified in some exceptional situations, as long as specific forms of compensation, accountability, supervision, and approval are in place, reflection based on philosophy indicates that racial profiling is almost always not justifiable based on its intrinsic features and the probable consequences, even when one abstracts from the horror and shame of police prejudice, brutality, and violence.

References

Alexander, L., & Schwarzschild, M. (2013). Race Matters.

Birzer, M. L. (2012). Racial Profiling: They Stopped Me Because I’m————!. CRC Press.

Delgado, D. J. (2018). “My Deputies Arrest Anyone Who Breaks the Law”: Understanding How Color-blind Discourse and Reasonable Suspicion Facilitate Racist Policing. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 4(4), 541-554.

Glaser, J. (2015). Suspect race: Causes and consequences of racial profiling. Oxford University Press, USA.

Harris, D. A. (2017). Racial profiling.

Taylor, P. C. (2013). Race: A philosophical introduction. Polity.

Vera Sanchez, C. G., & Rosenbaum, D. P. (2011). Racialized policing: Officers’ voices on policing Latino and African American neighborhoods. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, 9(2), 152-178.

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