What sort of psychological effects might racial profiling have on those targeted individuals?
This sort of racial profiling that Levin is suggesting could cause, I think, a substantial amount of psychological trauma to any given individual. Though it's true that if your life is depend on being offensive, it is appropriate to be offensive. However, I think that firstly; Levin fabricated statistics to the extent that the actual statistics make his point moot. Secondly, I think that all people are prone to various emotional problems: If everyone started to avoid a single person based on appearance, that person being target may very well develop image issues and become unhealthy. Alternately, there could be many people who are simply having a horrendous day and, after seeing someone sprint away from them because of their appearance, may choose to go home and kill themselves. Additionally this sort of behaviour does not inspire any sort of change, and in fact, it would likely incite aggression and violent anger from those being profiled against those who profile against them
First, a disclaimer; this is not all that closely related to Brandon's post. I simply found a particular point in it interesting, and wished to elaborate upon it. This post also relates, slightly, to a previous post I made.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that otherwise relatively insignificant actions can have large effects on people due to other, unknown circumstances is actually quite well-documented, although usually in positive rather than negative cases. For example, there have been some instances of people deciding against killing themselves because they heard a particular song on the radio. As such, it seems logical that similarly minor events can have equally major effects in the opposite direction. Also, even when a single negative action is not enough to harm a person to a major extent, the cumulative effect of many minor negative actions can easily add up to major consequences - in fact, many (perhaps even most) cases of non-chemical depression or suicide are due to a series of negative occurrences happening to one unfortunate person. While of course it is impossible to know a person's exact circumstances, and so in most cases one's attempting to be exceptionally nice will be essentially irrelevant, the sometimes disproportionate effects of minor actions may be enough to encourage one to increase one's positive behaviour and decrease negative behaviour.
P.S. I also posted this on my blog if you'd rather read it there.