Racial profiling occurs at JHU - Perfidy to Jersey?

This past week, the American Civil Liberties Union mounted a billboard between exits 12 and 13 on the New Jersey Turnpike which reads, "Stopped and Searched by the New Jersey State Police? They admit to racial profiling. You might win money damages. Call the A.C.L.U. hot line: 1-877-6-PROFILE."

According to new state police records disclosed to the Associated Press this past July, half of the drivers stopped on the turnpike from Nov. 1, 1997 through April 30, 1998, were black or Hispanic. Racial profiling is undoubtedly a fundamental problem throughout the country, and New Jersey has been focused on because of its ghastly data. Take for instance a plaintiff in a 1997 case as cited in The New York Times: he is a black dentist who attests that he has been pulled over in his luxury car over 100 times, acquiesced to searches, and has received nil tickets. This makes me sick to my stomach.

Many are arguing that these state policepersons must go through more rigorous race-based enforcement training. Although I think that it's difficult to alter someone's mind who is more skeptical of a black person than a white person, we must hope and do whatever is in our power to eradicate this prejudiced-incited phenomenon, and it can start with some kind of training. (I hope that professional training teaches these policepersons more than "professional lessons.") The A.C.L.U. is taking some obligatory additional measures to make New Jerseyans aware of their rights (but I have a small problem with the language the billboard uses - the message seems more or less a luck-of-the-draw option than an assuring promise).

I don't own a car and neither does most of the Hopkins student population. But I've seen other forms of racial profiling manifest around campus: observing students assume that Charles Village citizens who aren't students may be potential criminals. It doesn't happen all of the time, but last year I witnessed what I saw to be a racially-based course of action. A McCoy security officer stopped a black man who entered the building with a group of students past the access-card read door. Now keep in mind that people walk with others through similar security posts on campus every few minutes! The man was not a student and he did not look menacing; he arrived to visit his friend. I would have been pretty pissed off if I had been him and would have wondered if the same thing would have happened to a white man during a weekday afternoon.

What bothered me even more was what I saw when I attended a barbeque event on the Beach last spring. Several black men were meandering about and some students were ostensibly avoiding them. I even witnessed somebody speak to the chefs warning them that these innocent pedestrians might cause a problem.

Now I know Hopkins doesn't have a large black and Hispanic student population, while Baltimore does. Also, I readily admit that crimes do occur on and around campus occasionally. It's perfectly reasonable to avoid street hecklers or threatening beggars - regardless of race.

But I have difficult suppressing my anger towards unfounded instances of racial profiling around campus, few and far between as they might actually be. While we hope that our state's law officials are trustworthy enough to judge our civilians on a case-by-case basis, we see that sometimes our neighbors can't even do the same thing when they're walking down our streets.

Studying race teaches us so many things about ourselves and those around us. We should fervently study race relations to see how we can learn from America's - furthermore the world's - past in, for example, the Rodney King beating or the Diallo murder. I think that no matter what we learn and discover in pondering race concerns, we should remain steadfast in first realizing that being connected to a certain race does not make us better than anyone else, should not make us suspicious of others, and should never cause us to unnecessarily single someone else out.

If anyone thinks that being a college student is a way to avoid "the real world," they're incredibly mistaken. Subtle events, such as the racial profiling occurrences that I witnessed, are more "real worldly" than working a full-time job or paying the bills precisely because they fashion how we think about others throughout our lives. How could we not see connections between the few racial profiling incidents I saw on campus and the incidents we hear about on the turnpike and on roads around the country?

I wish that every New Jersey State Trooper realized that stopping a black man for no reason is just like being stopped in Montana only for bearing New Jersey license plates - that is, that they realized that an unsuspicious (but, according to the perpetrators, "atypical") appearance is not a criterion by which we can judge people.

Americans can hope to eradicate all forms of racial profiling not just by accusing our law enforcers of being bigoted, nor by telling them that they must train differently. We perceive racial profiling through our own eyes, and must start with ourselves to individually assess the roots of this problem.

The A.C.L.U. effectively lets us know our rights, but we need to recognize, at any given point, that despite where we come from and whom we are, we should be treated as equals. We are fortunate enough to have been given and get reminded of such rights founded on the recognition of equality. But in order for everyone to eliminate racial profiling on the Jersey Turnpike, on Art Museum Dr. or in McCoy, we should realize that the foundations of recognizing equality did not only give us our rights; they should help us to defend them, no matter what the context.