Racial Profiling (Or Not?)

According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of California at Berkeley, citing concerns about SARS, has barred students from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan from its summer session. The policy was announced in a statement on the university’s web site.

Is this racial profiling? If it is, is it legitimate? What if the university, citing concerns about terrorism, had barred students from, say, Yemen, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria? Should the idea of a quarantine be, well, quarantined to the public health sphere?

No one has written more intelligently on racial profiling that Heather Mac Donald. See, for example, her article in City Journal from two years ago, now expanded into a book, Are Cops Racist? The thrust of her argument has been that racial profiling is a “myth.” Her City Journal article begins by noting that “[t]here’s no credible evidence that racial profiling exists,” and a recent OpEd in the the Washington Post begins on the same theme:

It is widely assumed that racial profiling is both common and well documented. In fact, the evidence for it is weak.

In fact, however, the reality of racial profiling, whatever it is, is more complex, and indeed Ms. Mac Donald’s argument itself is far more subtle and complex than calling it a “myth” would suggest. When she writes in the OpEd, for example, that officers “observe a wealth of nonracial cues to determine whom to approach,” she seems to imply that they observe some racial data as well. Similarly, in her City Journal article she distinguishes between “hard” racial profiling — an officer who “uses race as the only factor in assessing criminal suspiciousness” — and “soft” profiling:

using race as one factor among others in gauging criminal suspiciousness: the highway police, for example, have intelligence that Jamaican drug posses with a fondness for Nissan Pathfinders are transporting marijuana along the northeast corridor. A New Jersey trooper sees a black motorist speeding in a Pathfinder and pulls him over in the hope of finding drugs.

Ms. Mac Donald thus does not so much deny the existence of racial profiling as defend some versions of it. She argues that in many situations “where an officer has many clues to go on, race may be among them.”

I flatter myself (well, someone has to) by indulging in the notion that I was comparing racial profiling to racial preferences in admissions and hiring long before such comparisons had become commonplace. In any event, Mac Donald’s “race as one of many factors” language makes that comparison obvious, and inevitable.

A thorough comparison — more thorough than any I’ve yet seen — is also necessary in order to clarify the underlying principles, especially because many of those who sympathize with Mac Donald’s nuanced defense of profiling have no sympathy at all for even the most nuanced defenses of racial profiling by admissions officers et. al. while many of those who glorify the most blatant racial profiling in admissions regard even limited profiling by police, airline security personnel, etc., as an outrage. (For a thoughtful article that recognized the value of racial profiling while nevertheless rejecting it because of an uncompromising committment to colorblindness, by the police, see Randall Kennedy in The New Republic, Sept. 20, 1999: “Racial profiling usually isn’t racist. It can help stop crime. And it should be abolished.” Elsewhere, however, Kennedy continues to support affirmative action.)

If race may be taken into account here, why not there? Concomitantly, if we need not be colorblind there, why must we be here?

Theorists, rejoice! There is still theoretical work to be done.