Supreme Court’s Male Justices Violate Fourth Amendment Over Sonia Sotomayor’s Devastating Dissent
Justice Sotomayor’s heartfelt bid to do away with racial profiling once and for all was thwarted by the high court’s male contingent.
Supreme Court justices at President Obama's 2016 State of the Union address. (Evan Vucci / AP)
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Donald Trump, the opposite of a “wise Latina,” also had his say on racial profiling this week. In the wake of the June 12 mass shooting in Orlando, Trump said in an interview on CBS, “Well, I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” in reference to Muslims. He added, “It’s not the worst thing to do,” and went on to cite Israel as a model for how the U.S. could implement racial profiling of Muslims. Incidentally, soldiers in the Middle Eastern nation that has earned pariah status for its immoral occupation and siege of Palestinian territories recently shot dead a 15-year-old Palestinian boy. Israeli authorities, who routinely defend the police profiling of Arabs, are now saying the teenager was “mistakenly” killed.
Trump has repeatedly called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. How he would enact and enforce such a ban defies imagination. But on the issue of racial profiling, the demagogic candidate is not too far off from what federal law enforcement agencies are already doing under the Democratic presidency of Barack Obama. The FBI has long singled out the American Muslim community for surveillance. It has also aggressively tried to lure Muslims into agreeing to commit acts of terrorism in a manner that many suggest constitutes entrapment. In fact, the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was interviewed twice by the FBI over suspicions, and the agency even reportedly tried to tempt him into agreeing to some sort of illegal activity. And yet the agency was unable to stop his attack at the Pulse Orlando nightclub.
In fact, if the government was really interested in reducing the worst type of crimes in our society — mass murders — and it wanted to employ racial profiling as a tool, it might do well to single out white men. A recent analysis of mass shootings in the U.S. found that the majority of such crimes were committed by white men. Journalist Shaun King and analyst Van Jones have both recently countered the unfair practice of racial profiling by contending there is a sound theoretical basis for profiling white men.
Ultimately, racial profiling is an intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt approach to crime prevention that often yields few or incorrect results, violates the rights of a large number of innocent people and functions as a bludgeon in the hands of the powerful against the powerless. The strongest defenses of the flawed approach have emerged from the demographic that benefits the most from “otherizing” people of color. But the U.S. is a changing country, and thankfully it will not be long before the Sotomayors of the nation outnumber and outlive the dinosaurs defending violations of our constitutional rights.
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