On Racial Profiling

I had a bit of coincidence in my e-mail in-box this morning. I am on several e-mail lists authored by people who passionately support Israel. One of them is Mordechai Ben-Menachem at Ben-Gurion University. This morning I had this from Mordechai:

HISTORY TEST

Please pause a moment, reflect back, and take the following multiple choice test. The events are actual events from history. They actually happened! Do you remember?

1. 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by:

a. Superman
b. Jay Leno
c. Harry Potter
d. a Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40

2. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and
massacred by:

a. Olga Corbett
b. Sitting Bull
c. Arnold Schwarzenegger
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

3. In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:

a. Lost Norwegians
b. Elvis
c. A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

And so on an so on. A list of 13 questions to which the "right" answer was always "Muslim male extremists between the ages of 17 and 40." At the end was the punch line:

Nope, I really don't see a pattern here to justify profiling, do you?

Not ten minutes later, I find that my inbox also contains this from the Washington Post:

Seven bullets fired into a young Brazilian man's head by an undercover policeman who mistook him for a suicide bomber have set off an impassioned debate over the rights and wrongs of anti-terrorism tactics and racial profiling in one of the world's most ethnically diverse cities.

Profiling is a necessary evil in trying to prevent and solve crimes, and, with respect to today's brand of terrorism, ethnicity is necessarily an element of such a profile. Inevitably, also, we have to do some profiling of our own: In walking down a deserted urban street at night, I am justifiably more concerned about the potential threat posed by six teenagers in gang colors than I am about three couples in their 60s.

But as we go about this daily ritual of threat assessment, we need to keep ever in our mind the danger that can flow from such prejudgments. It is for this reason that I found the angst in the Washington Post article so much more humane than the glib near-advocacy of collective guilt in Mordechai's "history test."