Dr. Williams on Profiling
Damn, is Dr. Walter E. Williams great or what? Fabulous piece; here's my favorite part:
There is no sense of justice or decency that a law-abiding black person should suffer the indignity being passed up. At the same time, a taxicab driver has a right to earn a living without being robbed, assaulted and possibly murdered. One of the methods to avoid victimization is to refuse to pick up certain passengers in certain neighborhoods or passengers thought to be destined for certain neighborhoods. Again, a black person is justifiably angered when refused service but that anger should be directed toward the criminals who prey on cabbies.
Emphasis mine. The cops didn't start it, y'all. As the man said at the beginning, the world is imperfect. Don't ignore the great imperfection present in a violent criminal to focus your microscope on the lesser and rather justifiable imperfection of the cab driver.
The Cabbie's Dilemma is an interesting problem in evidence theory. It's effectively the same as the Lieutenant JG's Dilemma, in which some poor young schmuck has to decide whether to blow an approaching fishing boat out of the water.
ReplyDeleteWhile you can always set up a decision model to have no false alarms (e.g., pick up everyone, never shoot at a fishing boat), that's going to add risk, and a decision model that is not adjusted to the actual risk is not one the user will pay attention to.
It's up to the individual to better his or her own situation in life to the best of his/her ability. If a black person dresses and acts more like a white person they have more chance of being treated well, picked up by a driver, etc. That doesn't sounds very nice, but that's the way it is. Tuck the shirt in--that action costs $0.00.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people may disbelieve me and think this is a rather simplistic notion which has no evidence. Common sense and experience teach otherwise. I was with a dude visiting from Europe once who was extremely distrustful of American blacks, to put it as mildly as possible. He saw a black student walking down the street in the Pitt University neighborhood and said to me something like this: "There is a good guy, you can tell. See, he has blue jeans, but he's wearing black polished shoes and his shirt is tucked in. He is from Africa--probably a serious person, not American."