Never Forget Our People Were Always Free by Benjamin Todd Jealous

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free by Benjamin Todd Jealous

Author:Benjamin Todd Jealous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-11-21T00:00:00+00:00


13

Serial (Killer) Mistakes

Nothing highlights the dangers of America’s racial fixation more powerfully than a look at our history of failing to stop preventable atrocities committed by terrorists and serial killers.

When I was a student at Oxford, Professor Hood and I discussed the pernicious security failures inherent to racial profiling. He explained there was an alternative. The alternative was to focus on what people do, not what they look like. It’s as simple as that, and yet as hard as breaking any old habit.

In 2000, George W. Bush won the presidency on a platform that included ending racial profiling and passing comprehensive immigration reform. Tragically, he abandoned both in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The battle to end racial profiling took two massive blows: the president abandoned the cause, and the number of Americans who were targets of profiling increased massively. Law enforcement scrutiny of every American who was Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, or a Christian from the Middle East or South Asia went through the roof. As it did for anyone who looked even vaguely like they might be from the Middle East or South Asia. I found myself suddenly being repeatedly frisked at airports again. The only other time that had happened to me was during the first Gulf War.

I decided I needed to go back to organizing. I took a job launching Amnesty International USA’s U.S. Domestic Human Rights program. Yes, you read that right: USA, U.S., and Domestic all in the name of one program. The name was awkwardly repetitive for a reason: across Amnesty International’s fifty-five national organizations, across its global movement, there was no precedent for a domestic human rights program. This was the era of the United States being the world’s “sole superpower.” It would take U.S. citizens to police the U.S. government on human rights abuses at home. And in America, that often means matters of race.

I began setting up our campaign to fight racial profiling.

Guided by a young criminologist on my team, Dr. Niaz Kasravi, we dispatched human rights observers to federal “Special Registration” sites. That program was as dumb as it was discriminatory. Immigrants from several predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were being required to register with the federal government. The lines were long. People would routinely lose wages, even their job, trying to comply. Meanwhile, it was a safe guess that no terrorist was complying. We were humiliating honest and hardworking new Americans and giving al-Qaeda new fodder to use in their recruiting. Dumb just got dumber.

We traveled the country listening to victims of racial profiling. We heard stories of Black professionals being humiliated in front of coworkers, Native American men being humiliated on their way home from religious events, and Latino and Hmong American kids being humiliated in front of their friends. These stories would break your heart.

In Los Angeles, we found our first group of White victims. They were stock traders who lived south of the city. They had to be at their desks between three and four a.



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