RACIAL PROFILING Experts Discuss Racial Profiling By Ribby Goodfellow Hoya Staff Writer

A panel of experts addressed racial profiling and its implications after Sept. 11 to approximately 80 students and community members in ICC auditorium.

The four-member panel included Hodan Hussein, a representative from the Council of American Islamic Relations, Kareem Shora, legal counsel from the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Kelli Evans, an attorney from the civil rights firm Relman and Associates and Democratic Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee Keenan Keller.

Panel moderator and Black Student Alliance Treasurer Zoe Polk (COL’03) began by saying, “Racial profiling, which affects not only African-Americans, Hispanics, but Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims as well, denies people their right to live and challenges freedom, equality and justice in the United States.”

The panel focused mainly on airline profiling and reported public backlash against the Muslim American community after the Sept. 11 attacks. Hussein noted that her organization had received 1,700 incident reports of public harassment, work place discrimination, property damage and death threats directed towards uslim Americans in the five months following the September attacks, while only 640 complaints found were reported the prior year. “It’s clear that [American Muslims] are considered guilty until proven innocent,” she said.

Shora and Evans focused on the legal inequities and civil liberties concerns they found in racial profiling. Evans’ firm is currently representing the Arab American Secret Service agent denied boarding an American Airlines flight allegedly because of his ethnicity. “Racial profiling does not promote safety. It does not make us safer; it is not based on objective factors,” he said.

Referring to non-Arab Muslim extremists John Walker Lindh and Richard Reid, Evans said that under current racial profiling policy, these types of people “would have slipped through and in the case of Reid, did slip through the cracks all because they didn’t have stereotypical Arab characteristics.”

Shora cited specific examples of “upstanding, patriotic Americans” who reported suffering discrimination solely because of their ethnicity and religion and likened the experience to the U.S. internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Keenan Keller quoted Dick Gregory, another observer of racial profiling after Sept. 11: “When people are afraid, things don’t need to make sense.” He said that people have thrown away their common sense because of this fear, which “is not the right thing to do.”

Evans, a former American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represented plaintiffs in the recent New Jersey State Police racial profiling court case, noted that profiling “undermines the constitutional rights of everybody.” Keller said that “the Constitution is the bedrock we live upon and if we ignore this and look to racial profiling to fix our problems, we put our freedoms in jeopardy.”

The Black Student Alliance, Muslim Student Association, Young Arab Leadership Alliance and Leaders in Educating about Diversity sponsored the event.