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AAI in the News

Concern for racial profiling amid search for terrorist ties

By Annette John-Hall
Philadelphia Inquirer
Posted on Sunday October 7, 2001

James J. Zogby is distinctly “Arab-looking.” For years, he says, his dark Lebanese features have drawn the stares of fellow airline passengers and caused him to be pulled out of boarding lines.

“I was profiled,” he maintains, “under guidelines that were purely subjective.”
Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, now fears that other law-abiding citizens will be subjected to similar unfair scrutiny, particularly on New Jersey’s highways, where the FBI has told state police to “be on the lookout” for nearly 300 Middle Easterners who may have information about last month’s terrorist missions.

The irony is lost on no one – least of all those previously targeted – that these are the same New Jersey troopers who came under fire for using racial profiles to stop African American and Latino motorists in a drug trafficking operation along Interstate 95 several years ago.

“What I hear [callers] saying is, ‘Now you understand what we’ve been going through,’ ” says Karen Warrington, afternoon host on the African American-oriented station WHAT-AM (1340).

Minorities who objected to racial profiling when they were its subjects are wrestling with their feelings about the practice now that it involves issues of national security.

Kenneth Meeks, author of Driving While Black: What to Do If You Are a Victim of Racial Profiling, admits to having mixed emotions about profiling if it helps ferret out those connected to the Sept. 11 attacks. A managing editor at Black Enterprise magazine, he was on his way to work in Manhattan when he witnessed the second plane crash into the World Trade Center, then watched in horror as the towers crumbled.

“I haven’t been the same since,” he says. “Frankly I was mad. I wanted to fight back, get them all.”

With time, Meeks has reconsidered. “I cannot subscribe to profiling under any condition,” he now says.

Condemning the practice is important, “especially [to] us, as blacks, because of our history. A black man would whistle at a white woman and a mob of white people would come into the neighborhood and burn everybody up. . . . We can’t do that to others.

“For a free society to work, there has to be a certain degree of trust,” believes Meeks, who says he was detained by police “plenty of times” before he cut his dreadlocks two years ago.

Yet even he admits: “I do become suspicious when I’m around an Arab now. It’s just a human reaction.”

“I’ve spoken to Arab American leaders and told them to get ready for a wave of oppression,” says former Pennsylvania State Rep. Ben Ramos. “This is going to be a long-term law enforcement initiative. We’re probably looking at another decade of this.”

Though those wanted by police are all Arab, they resemble members of many races and ethnic groups. “Latinos could be profiled, many African Americans, Greeks, Italians . . . almost everyone I can think of,” says Zogby. One of the alleged hijackers “looked like my cousin,” says Meeks. In his North Philadelphia neighborhood, says Ramos, many Puerto Ricans fit the physical description.

Literally, say the men, profiling affects only those with a particular look. Philosophically, it affects everyone.

“The moment you violate people’s civil rights you open yourself up to being violated,” says Ramos, who is Puerto Rican. Growing up in North Philadelphia, he says he was frequently singled out by police, who viewed him as a drug suspect.

As the Bush administration pushes for broader governmental powers – everything from deporting noncitizens to attaining greater wiretap authority – many in law enforcement argue that extraordinary measures are necessary in extraordinary times.

In a recent newspaper op-ed piece he titled “Rethinking Racial Profiling,” New Jersey State Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. wrote that all of the people on the lookout list are Arab, like the suspected hijackers. The U.S. Justice Department permits ethnicity and race in suspect information, and in this case, he said, they are essential “identifiers.”

In its efforts to control drug trafficking, police profiling of African Americans and Latinos on interstate highways was wrong, said Farmer: “The cost to society in humiliation . . . ultimately outweighed the danger that was being addressed.”

But with nearly 5,600 dead or missing as the result of the terrorist acts, Farmer believes the alleged perpetrators’ shared ethnicity cannot be ignored. “Law enforcement tactics,” he wrote, “must be calibrated to address the magnitude of the threat society faces.”

Temple University law professor Jan C. Ting, a former deputy commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has known prejudice first-hand. Growing up outside Detroit in the 1950s, Ting says he was harassed by his white schoolmates every Dec. 7.

“They would come up to me and say, ‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’ ” he recalls. “It was too difficult to explain to them that I was Chinese.”

Yet he believes that Arabs and those of Arab descent should expect to being singled out as law enforcement tries “to resolve the threat of terrorism in our midst. That has to be the first priority.”

That is not to say that U.S. citizens who fit the profile should be treated the same as aliens, says Ting.

“American citizens have greater rights in my view and ought to be given the benefit of the doubt. I do think it’s permissible to question aliens” – even those who hold green cards, says Ting – because “they don’t have the loyalty that citizens have.”

But using broad-brush characteristics – such as being dark, male and potentially Muslim – as the sole justification to detain individuals can veer toward discrimination, says Bruce Rahdert, who teaches constitutional law at Temple.

“It’s no different than saying you’re looking for a people with large scars,” he says. “When you have no other information than perhaps a person’s nationality or religion, one jumps to the conclusion that everyone of that nationality or religion may be dangerous.”

Farmer has appealed to the Arab community for patience with law enforcement “if the net sweeps too broadly.” This should not become “open season” on Muslim Americans and Arab Americans, he said. Yet inevitably, he concedes, “innocent people will be viewed with suspicion.”

In an environment fraught with fear, air passengers of Arab descent have already singled out by the airlines. A Northwest Airlines crew in Minneapolis recently refused to allow three Iraqi nationals who had already cleared security to board a flight to Salt Lake City when passengers said they were uncomfortable by their presence. The men were allowed to take another flight.

Zogby sardonically refers to his airport experiences as the consequence of “FWA” – Flying While Arab. Nevertheless, he says, other interactions he has witnessed have given him hope.

“From the official level down to the lady next door who baked me brownies, there have been untold gestures of kindness,” he says.

At a mall recently, Zogby witnessed two people approach a pair of veiled Muslim women and extend warm greetings.

“I thought, ‘This is the real America.’ I think we’ll get through this, but law enforcement has to make it easier, not harder.”