Five Types Of Racial Profiling

“Racial profiling punishes innocent individuals for the past actions of those who look and sound like them… It has no place in our national discourse.”⁠13 Benjamin Todd Jealous former president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shared his distain for racial profiling. Race, nationality, gender, age, and social status are just five of the many criteria used when categorizing others into groups. But unfortunately out of all these the far most impactful element is race. A race is a biological subspecies, or variety of a species, consisting of a more or less distinct population with anatomical traits that distinguish it clearly from other races.⁠14 “Race is understood as a socio-culturally defined category of people who share genetically transmitted physical characteristics⁠15” such as skin and hair color, body shape, and facial type. Although one may share the same physical traits as another there is no understood connection between the two. “A baby can be placed into another culture shortly after birth and can be thoroughly enculturated to that culture, regardless of their skin color, body shape, and other presumed racial features.”⁠16 This theory is evident in such circumstances as …show more content…
By allowing racial characteristics to discern personal identity, discrimination is made easier. Racial profiling magnifies biological differences and disregards sociological similarities.⁠21 Instead of looking at how one another’s biology differs from each other’s, people must learn to look at cultural and social tendencies.⁠22 In the words of Martin Luther King Jr. a person should, “not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”⁠23 People must look beyond the blinding mask of race which makes up a person physically and look at that which makes up their