Racial profiling is the practice of targeting particular people because of their ethnic background or race.
I witnessed an act of racial profiling today.
Driving home from the store with a friend of mine, we approached a border patrol stop checkpoint. This was a checkpoint set up in Lebanon New Hampshire. Lebanon NH is 113 miles from Canada and 2,221 miles from Mexico.
The traffic was backed up and congested. There was a border patrol agent walking a dog between the isles of cars. A sign read "all vehicles must stop ahead." I was prepared to stop and show my license. I was nervous because I do not carry my passport. As we got closer to the agent directing the cars through the stop signs, the car ahead of me was waved through. The car was not stopped, there was no interaction. No questions asked.
Then it was my turn. He looked at my friend and me, two young white girls, and we were waved through. No questions asked. Just as we passed through the stop we saw the line of cars that were asked to pull to the side for further investigation. There were approximately 15 cars on the side.
There was one thing that stood out like a sore thumb: every single person who was being interrogated was a person of color.
I just have a question. Why did I not get asked about my citizenship status? The objective of these checkpoints is, according to the Concord Monitor, to "cite legal non-citizen residents who aren't carrying federal identification cards and arrest undocumented people."
In a statement given to the Concord Monitor, CBP said,
"CBP will continue to operate immigration checkpoints with the primary purpose to apprehend illegal aliens and those involved in smuggling operations."
How is it that these border patrol agents are able to decipher a legal citizen from a non-legal citizen without ever looking at any form of identification? How come I was never asked to provide any sort of identification or even simply asked of my citizenship status at a checkpoint set up to explicitly determine legal from illegal citizenship?
The short, blunt, honest answer: white privilege.
