Racial Profiling

Watching real police chat on the radio on TV shows, we often hear an assailant being described, with the aim of police patrols identifying and catching them.

Example, "We're looking for a big Islander."

News reports often refer to an incident involving a woman, and a woman of Asian appearance.

Forever it seems, these comments have been acknowledged and we move on. The issue is the event, not the person's ethnic identity. What have they done, we ask, having forgotten the description of the person and now focussed on the event.

Why has this kind of description been used for so long, by reporters, witnesses, the police and even in banter and daily discussion?

Because it's obvious. No thought about it is considered. It's a non-issue.

We as humans group things into classes based on each member of the class sharing a distinct qualtity.

If someone tells you they fell off a chair yesterday, will you ask them "what is a chair?"

You know what a chair is. A chair is a physical object identified by its appearance. Its appearance which includes features that other obejcts have and therefore belong to the group "Chairs".

Chairs are things that have potential for being sat upon, usually a platform for the buttocks suspended from the ground by legs.

It is a no-brainer that human beings have the propensity to be classified in the same way; a physical appearance held among some humans leading to the creation of a class of members that all share the same physical features.

Who would not know what a member of the class Women would look like?

Who would say, if you tell me you are dating an Indian, "I wonder what they look like?"?

It is only because people look a certain way and a way shared among many others, that we create and understand the collective term to describe them.

If every single person was a different shape and colour, we might not have a single word to class them. But they don't all look unique.

Genetic heredity and intra-breeding have created groups of humans that appear to share the same shapes and colours to their physicality.

It is no suprise when the child of two parents shares many of their parent's physical features.

On the contrary, great surprise and some awkward conversation, happens when a child has the features of one but not the other. Example, a black child to two white parents.

This fact that humans come in different features, but those features are shared, is very helpful when it comes to description.

This is how terms like race and ethnicity were easily accepted into societal vernacular.

We even noticed that there was a consistent relation between the appearance of someone and their location on the planet. Not many Chinese discovered by Marco Polo were six foot tall and blonde and blue-eyed. He would have noticed some commonalities in their physcial appearance.

Inheriting dominant genetic phenotypes through intrabreeding is the cause of these common features, we now know, but knew anyway despite the science.

Sure, it's not an exact science. Sure sometimes we get it wrong. But here is the reason why we mostly get it right.

Inter-breeding between different ethnic groups reduces the accuracy. But intra-breeding outweighs in numbers inter-breeding and so we can still tell the difference between most ethnic groups based only on physical appearance.

The proof of accuracy is in the results. The police use racially-based, physically-based, descriptions today and they work most of the time, which is why they still use it.

Recently, a movement has protested this practice. They call it Racial Profiling.

Racial Profiling is when you look at someone's physical appearance and assument they belong to a group AND this group has a propensity or likelihood to behave a certain way.

Well they do!

Not only do some humans share physcial characteristics that usually align them with an ethnic group, but they also behave in a way common to that group.

There are some particular behaviours performed differently by some groups of similar appearance from others.

That is because genetic heredity of physciality does occur among people of the same communities. A community has its own behaviours, beliefs etc.

If a village in Africa intra-breeds, the members will not only look alike, they will behave alike, because they behave within their community's norms, values, beliefs and customs.

This makes it possible to identify not only what village a human comes from, but what behaviours they are likely to display.

Racial Profilng is no more offensive or racist than Furniture Profiling.

It is not a denegration or personal attack or attack on the group of people.

It is an accurate means to identify a person when no other means is possible.

If a burglar is described by witnesses as black or Chinese-looking, the police will not waste resources to search for and detain everyone.

If you think people cannot be identified by their physcial appearance, you are deranged.

We will stop racial profiling when people stop looking and behaving in groups.