Staples's essay brings to our attention the choice society must continuously make between stereotyping, profiling, and disregardance of appearance. The best choice for society is profiling. In the aftermath of September 11th, our country has moved towards stereotyping. Staples's essay reminds us that stereotyping can be damaging, an issue I'm glad he brings light to, but I disagree with the stance I'm assuming he's taking (and that many take) that profiling along with stereotyping should be eliminated. Profiling is an essential tool in ensuring increased safety. Many would argue that profiling is a euphemism for stereotyping. But after careful research, I can confidently say that they are not the same. Stereotyping is "A conventional, formulaic, and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image". This is what the lady in Staples's story did. Profiling would be, "I have a young black man behind me. Young black men are statistically more likely to commit crimes. Therefore, I should be careful." And maybe the profiler would proceed to walk a little faster. The difference between stereotyping and profiling is subtle. The words have become so synonymous over time that it is difficult to even write about the difference, but profiling stands out as being used in a context related to crime and in involving a focus on the use of facts. Part of the difficulty that arises when discussing this issue is that racial profiling is actually closer to stereotyping than actual profiling (this is a good article on this oddity: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/22/opinion/la-oe-dutta-racial-profiling-20101122). Profiling is the awareness of potential danger based on past patterns combined with the knowledge that people cannot be defined by their appearance. Stereotyping in contrast is oversimplified. A stereotyper might make the assumption for example that a white person is automatically of European descent. In reality, others, for example Iraqis, are also considered white. A profiler would take into account that most white people are of European descent (actually this might not be true worldwide but we're talking about the United States), but not automatically assume a white person is so. A major issue arises when people associate stereotyping (and its negative connotations) with profiling. Profiling is an integral part in maintaining a safe society. Israel's main international airport, Ben Gurion Airport, is one of the safest airports worldwide even though it is located in a country surrounded by neighbors that want it wiped off the planet. Why? Because the airport has a substantial number of guards who use profiling to ensure safety. At the airport you are asked a series of questions by guards who use body language, your answers, raw data, and yes, to a certain extent, race to ensure security. The success of the Israeli method cannot be understated. Assuming that all Palestinians dislike/hate Israel (not a stretch of the imagination at all), Israel has 11,000,000 enemies. This isn't including all of the other Islamic countries in the region who also hate Israel. The implementation of whatever security Israel uses seems like a clear no-brainer to me. Meanwhile in the western world, we have underwear bombers and pat downs (I've never actually been patted so I'm assuming this is a euphemism for grope down; also my brother and I always get targeted for grope downs even though we're genial people of Dutch-German origin) of 90 year olds and 5 year olds. The lack of profiling was actually an aid in September 11th. The airline ticketing agent who checked in Mohamed Atta and a companion thought at the time "If this doesn't look like two Arab terrorists, I've never seen two Arab terrorists." While the ticketing agent actually used stereotyping in this instance, it is probable that profiling Atta and his friend would have resulted in the two terrorists not being allowed to board American Airlines Flight 11. Some may say that we don't need profiling, that our technology is powerful enough to uncover all weapons attempted to be brought on planes. This is a view our government has increasingly tried to sell us with their full-body scanners. The truth is, while they're pretty effective, they still can't detect low-density materials such as thin plastics, gels and liquids. The underwear bomber's bomb was a plastic explosive and the Government Accountability Office reported that they're not sure a scanner would’ve detected the underwear bomber's hot pants. My point of all this is that we need profiling, we just need to ensure it does not become stereotyping.
Now to discuss the essay as instructed. The essay is organized starting with an example meant to engage the audience followed by Staples's history as an educated member of society and finally his examples. Staples includes all of the examples in which he has been stereotyped against (you can tell it's stereotyping because profiling takes more time to develop a visible action and all of the actions committed against Staples are almost instantaneous reactions to his presence). The use of the classical music by Staples is an example of irony because it shows that he's more cultured than most white people around him (which society often stereotypically believes is the opposite). The classical music is how he shows others he's not dangerous along with the elaborate movements he does when he's in a crowd.
