We are all guilty of racial profiling
Letter to the Editor
I have been considering ideas for a Viewpoint letter ever since I heard the verdict of the Diallo case a few weeks ago. For those that do not know, Armadou Diallo was a 22-year-old West African who had immigrated to New York and was shot last February by four plain clothes police officers as he stood in the doorway of his Bronx apartment. On Feb. 26 the officers, who fired 41 shots on the unarmed Diallo, striking him 19 times, were acquitted of all charges brought against them.
I have had a difficult time articulating the emotions that I felt as a result of the verdict, ranging from sadness to rage, into words that I hoped would promote awareness on our campus. After all, Diallo was far away in the city of New York and, as many of us here on campus often ignore the news of the world outside our microcosm, it was hard to convey a message to which people could relate. I was finally pushed to write this when I picked up The Observer just before spring break and read the headline "ND students arrested at local Denny's." This time the problem had explicitly revealed itself on a local level and was affecting members of our community. The very problem that left an innocent and unarmed 22-year-old dead in his doorway at the hands of the police landed four innocent ND students in jail. The problem is racial profiling. We are all guilty. Guilty, at very least, of being indifferent and unaware. But more often, we are guilty, at some level or another, of the same kind of racial profiling that takes place on a daily basis throughout this nation. Sometimes it is highly publicized, as in the Diallo case, but more often that not it goes unnoticed by the population at large. We are guilty of it when we assume that a black fellow student must be an athlete, that he/she must have a particular background, or that he/she is here only because of a race-based quota policy that displaced a more deserving white student. We have all heard or participated in these assumptions and complaints. Every single person here deserves their spot and each has something valuable to contribute to the university as a whole, whether it is excellence in academics, athletics, or a different point of view. A large percentage of our school's population, namely that of the white American male, must come to terms with the fact that it has never and probably will never be oppressed in any way in its lifetime. Only when this is realized can we hope to alleviate the burden of the men and women who face unwarranted prejudice every day. Author James Baldwin stated the following in a letter to his nephew: "this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, "that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it." They are, in effect, trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it." We must open our eyes, promote awareness, and release ourselves from all types of prejudice and profiling, including racial, sexual, and religious. Quite simply, as it was once stated on some bathroom graffiti, "Hey apathetic college students, think!"
Kiernan Moriarty
First Year, St. Edward's
March 21, 2000
All Viewpoint Stories for Friday, March 24, 2000
