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Profiling and Internment

By tps12 (Thu Aug 05, 2004 at 11:27:43 PM EST) (all tags)

S.z. at World O'Crap, who has been keeping up on the Annie Jacobson "story" (and treating it with the appropriate level of disdain), points to a Washington Times editorial (number 3) that really gets to the heart of what this whole thing has always been about.

Racial profiling is seen by some as a reasonable response to the threat of terrorism because those people understand feeling more secure as a positive end in itself. This is why some people can point to Jacobson's account and use it as an example of why racial profiling is necessary even as others use it to show why racial profiling is a terrible idea. The former are addressing the issue of how secure we (for a definition of "we" considerably narrower than I'm comfortable with) feel, while the latter try to argue based on how secure we actually are.

Dave Neiwert explains, in his take-down of Michelle Malkin (who has flogged the Jacobson story tirelessly and hinted that she thought the correct response might be internment), how the excuses that are trotted out today to justify Japanese internment in the Second World War—intercepted communications regarding Japanese-American spies and attempts at sabotage—were not actually used to make the case for internment at the time. It had much more to do with playing on people's fears of the "yellow peril" in a way that made them feel more secure than it did with addressing any real security threat.

A way of looking at the current debate is in terms of the phrase "the terrorists have already won." On one side, people say that if Americans are afraid to fly on airplanes, then the terrorists have already won. On the other side, people say that if Americans are being denied their rights without due process then the terrorists have already won. Both sides identify the terrorists' winning as the ultimate bad result, and because each side's framing of the situation implicitly condones the very thing that the other associates with this ultimate bad result, no agreement or compromise can be realized.

This is exactly why the civil libertarians' argument, that racial profiling comes at a huge cost in rights while doing little to make us less vulnerable, falls on deaf ears: actually making anyone safer is not the primary goal of racial profiling supporters. Therefore, to oppose it on those grounds is fruitless. It must be acknowledged that, to a sizeable (and increasingly vocal) minority of Americans, merely feeling safer really is a worthwhile goal, a goal well served by profiling and even internment. Two potentially effective responses to this are

arguing persuasively that there are better ways to make people feel safer and
attempting to change people's framing of the subject.

Strangely, I feel like the first one would be easier, but can only conceive of approaches to the second, probably because my own understanding of the issue is too strongly aligned with one framework.

Ideas?

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