En fordom er en statistisk kendsgerning, der ikke er politisk korrekt. Er det ikke sådan, det er? Det er på sin vis, hvad Victor Davis Hansons artikel handler om. Og lidt til:
A Nation of Profilers
By Victor Davis Hanson
Profiling is considered among the worst of American sins.
Not long ago, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by the Cambridge, Mass., police for trying to enter his own locked
home after misplacing his key. Almost immediately, President Obama rushed to condemn what he thought was racial profiling. The police were acting “stupidly,” Obama concluded. He added: “There’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
Here is where the argument about an individual and the group turns nasty: Is using statistics on collective behavior a reasonable tool of law enforcement to anticipate the greater likelihood of a crime, or is it gratuitously stereotyping the innocent? Or sometimes both, depending on how it’s done?
Take the Arizona anti-illegal-immigration law. It gives police the right to ask for identification papers if they have reasonable cause to suspect that those questioned on a separate matter may be in the country illegally. In heated reaction to this new state law, we now hear everything from calls for a boycott of Arizona to allegations of Gestapo-like tactics.
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