A White mother who said she was questioned about human trafficking while traveling with her biracial daughter has filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines, accusing the company of “blatant racism.”
A White mother who said she was questioned about human trafficking while traveling with her biracial daughter has filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines, accusing the company of “blatant racism.”
If stopping Arabic-looking people stopped actual terrorist attacks, would it be worth it?
I gave this question far more thought than it probably deserves and the answer is no.
The only world in which this is possible is one where you define terrorism by appearance (which already hits pretty damn close to home). So I’d want the same mechanism applied to all people to catch the violent extremists of all appearances.
Fair point, but that’s a different context, and I agree with you with that sentiment.
The 9/11 terrorists didn’t even have beards. They tried to blend in as much as possible. So, you’re right. Harassing people with, say, beards and turbans is bullshit.
Curious what the argument for “no” might be.
I hope this is a bad attempt at a joke, because I feel like it should be obvious.
But let’s imagine you’re one of those Arabic-looking people. Would you okay with being strip-searched every time you went through airport security if it was in the name of stopping terrorism, while people of other races went through relatively unmolested?
How often would it stop terrorist attacks for each person stopped? We are talking about saving lives versus saving people from being offended correct?
The TSA can’t even prevent weapons from going through security checkpoints, and they have real equipment and guidelines for their security checks and still fail to find contraband over 80-90% of the time when they do internal audits of TSA security checkpoints.
The TSA is a joke as is, and the last thing we need is to give them more of a reason to harass people while failing to do their actual job.
You’re talking about formalising the concept of treating an entire demographic of people as 2nd class citizens who experience additional social barriers that others do not have to.
“I racially profiled every Mohammed in the US and 128,000 improper searches and surveillances down the list I discovered a terrorist. Mission accomplished.”
Thank you for providing a ratio. No I would not be okay with that.
I’m sure I wouldn’t be okay with racially profiling based on the real world numbers either. But I would be okay being questioned because I matched a statistically significant group of people who commit a crime that impacts the safety of others.
But I think the point is that race and gender are most often not statistically significant identifiers and shouldn’t be used. And if they are indicative, then it better not be used for any of amount of time longer than needed.
If we had intelligence that suggested we should expect a terrorist attack from a specific country during a specific time period at a specific airport then it might make sense on a temporary basis. I don’t know, I’m not a professional at preventing terrorist attacks.
If there were rules against race on a more permanent basis because of events in the past or something then that would be stupid, ineffective, and would needlessly offend people.
My only real issue with threads like these is the over generalization and trying to say that something should never happen or always happen. I don’t think life is like that.