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Timothy McVeigh, a young, brown-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian male to flee unsuspected. In 2002, during the sniper attacks in Washington, D.C., the two African-American criminals were able to go undetected for days because officials were following the serial-killer profile of an antisocial white male.
Why are we unable to learn from our mistakes? Do officials believe that there is a genetic strand for criminal' inherently present in anyone whose portrait could not be crayoned in apricot'? Even if there is a higher rate of offense per capita of non-Caucasians than Caucasians, why not focus the stem of the problem? If we could eliminate the discrimination that prevents so many non-Caucasians from getting well-paying jobs, then perhaps their children would no longer be driven to desperate measures. If we could at least try to improve the education systems of low-income neighborhoods (which are predominantly non-Caucasian), then I believe that we could lower the crime rate exponentially.

If this country is not ashamed of its action during World War II, then why don't we thoroughly teach our children about the more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were shuttled into internment camps following the Pearl Harbor bombings? As the famous saying by George Santayana goes: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I remember learning about the Civil War, hearing bits about the Women's Liberation movements, and reading parts of the Martin Luther King, Jr. speech in elementary school. I also recall the one paragraph that my six-hundred-page U.S. History textbook dedicated to speaking of the massacre at Wounded Knee. And I don't remember hearing anything about the Japanese internment camps.
In conclusion, racial, ethnic, and religious profiling have caused a decline in the security of our nation, not vice versa. The needs of the many may outweigh the needs of one, but we are not talking about a single person here. We're speaking of tens of thousands of people whose quality of life is being compromised by the majority's need to stereotype. We need to start moving forwards as a nation and as a people, and realize that no single identifying term Muslim, African-American, Hispanic, Jewish, Christian, or Caucasian creates a greater likelihood for crime and vice than any other. There is a line between reasonable suspicion and prejudice, and we have strayed so far from that line that many of us don't even know where it lies anymore.
As Rumi said: "Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there."

Malkin, Michelle. "Racial Profiling: A Matter of Survival." USA Today [Washington, D.C.]. 16 Aug 2004.

Miller, George. "Security." WordNet. 2006. Princeton University. 25 Feb 2007 .

Palmer, J. Jioni. "King endorses ethnic profiling." Newsday [Washington, D.C.]. 17 Aug 2006.

"Racial Profiling." Amnesty International USA. 2007. Amnesty International. 25 Feb 2007 .

"Racial Profiling: Old and New." ACLU. 2007. American Civil Liberties Union. 25 Feb 2007 .

Rhoads, Anai. "Ethnic and Religious Profiling in America." Global Research. 13 Nov 2002. Center for Research on Globalization. 25 Feb 2007 .

"Security". Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 2006. 25 February 2007.

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