Ignatieff on Discrimination, Social Media

One Response to “Ignatieff on Discrimination, Social Media”

1. E. Bardowell on January 14th, 2010 2:41 pm

   Mr. Ignatieff does not understand the feelings of resentment, hurt and distrust arise from racial profiling ‘only against the background of a society that minorities already perceive as racist. While profiling causes inconvenience and other harm, sometimes considerable, the primary contributor to resentment, hurt, and loss of trust is likely to be underlying racism or underlying socio-economic disadvantages, rather than profiling as such’. No evidence is given for this assumption.Likewise, none is given for the claim that if the Supreme Court outlawed racial profiling ‘the levels of resentment, hurt, and loss of trust among minority group members, we conjecture, would not be significantly lowered. Simply stopping the practice of profiling would do little to change society’s underlying racism and thus little to alter the attitudes that lead to police abuse and also promote various forms of racism in other segments of life’. it is ‘a form of harm that is itself parasitic on an underlying oppressive relationship that is independently present in society.
   And while indeed this sort of harm would not arise were it not for that underlying oppressive
   relationship…[the expressive harm] does not contribute to that oppressive relationship’. On this picture, racial profiling is not itself a form of racism, nor are the harms of profiling themselves forms of racism. Instead they are expressions of (racist) harms that occur elsewhere in society, leaving the motives behind profiling, the manner in which profiling occurs, and the consequences of profiling themselves magically clean, innocent and unscathed.
   It suggests that the choice of racial profiling as a technique for investigating and pursuing crime has nothing to do with our habit of thinking in racial terms when assessing the costs and benefits of social participation, and as though our habit of thinking in such terms were, itself, racially neutral. Neither is the case. Nor, indeed, can we readily imagine what it
   would be like to live in a society where these things were not true for, as with sexism, most societies have made invidious distinctions based on colour, ethnicity, and supposed biological attributes – though some have done this with more energy than others, both in terms of the number of
   distinctions that they have recognised, and in their commitment to shaping society accordingly. It is not easy, therefore, to think of racial profiling as itself a race-neutral form of policing, because the racial causes of crime that are the justification for profiling did not just fall from the sky. Nor is the idea to categorise crimes on the basis of race merely a bright idea that someone came up with, rather than a practice with a long history in white supremacist thought, and in the justification of white superiority over blacks.
   Indeed, it is hard to dissociate the choice of profiling over other policing techniques, or of
   other ways of deterring and punishing crime, from questions about the distribution of wealth, income
   and power amongst different racial groups in our societies and, therefore, of our relative willingness to pay – in terms of money, time, and inconvenience – for benefits to those who are not of our own group. If racism cannot be dissociated from ‘white flight’ to gated communities,from our unwillingness to pay for generous welfare entitlements, and for high quality public primary
   and secondary schools, and if it cannot be dissociated from our attitudes to the death penalty, then it is hard to imagine that it does not permeate our thinking about racial profiling, whether we will or no. If this is so, the idea that the harms of racial profiling are expressive – that is, arise because of harm attached to other practices or events – makes profiling seem more peripheral to racist habits of
   thought and action than it is likely to be, and draws attention to the way profiling reflects racist attitudes, institutions and habits at the cost of obscuring its contribution to them all.
   If racism has a systemic quality, rather than being a series of somewhat random acts,
   encounters and events, we should expect the harms of racial profiling to reflect racist attitudes and practices and the legacies of racism in society at large. But the reverse is also true: that we should expect racial profiling to exacerbate racism in society at large,
   even in apparently unrelated areas such as housing, transport, employment and entertainment. And that seems to be the case: profiling increases the likelihood that whites will think of blacks as importing crime into their supposedly crime-free neighbourhoods; it discourages blacks from travelling and working in white neighbourhoods, especially at night; and it provides a seemingly endless source of events, rumours and stereotypes for popular entertainment along ‘cops and robbers’ lines, happily obscuring the fact that the ownership of all sorts of horrendous weapons is perfectly legal in the US, and the basis for a large and powerful industry.

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