Michael Brus Proxy War Summary

On July 9th, 1999, Michael Brus’s article titled “Proxy War: Liberals denounce racial profiling. Conservatives denounce affirmative action. What's the difference?” was printed in Slate Magazine (Brus). This brief article is just over one thousand words, but its theme is to determine and state the relationship between racial profiling and affirmative action. These terms are thrown around by liberals and conservative all the time, and Brus is curious whether or not these terms represent the same thing. If these terms are the same, some questions that can arise include how does that change the political landscape and why use a different title for different situations? Determining any sort of clarification between the two terms can provide some insight while listening to politicians speaking about these issues, and the people can further understand if people truly understand what these different terms mean in relation to using race as a proxy. The structure of Brus’s argument in this article consists of five premises that lead to his conclusion on …show more content…
The second premise is explaining how “racial profiling” works. The example Brus gives is when police officers use race as a reason to place focus and search an individual. In this case, the proxy for the decision is race because these individuals are typically doing nothing wrong. Their race is the “warning sign” for officials, and some deem this as racist in nature. This leads to the third premise, which is simply that liberals generally regard “racial profiling” as racist and conservatives support it. This premise is simply an general label for how political party influences interpret the acts associated with “racial profiling.” This premise will be used for comparison after Brus introduces the final two