Origins of Racial Profiling

Racial profiling did not spring into existence in 1982 with the kickoff of Reagan's War on Drugs. Characterizations of people of color as menacing figures have long been a part of mainstream media and culture in the US. Racial profiling has existed in various forms since the end of slavery. During Reconstruction in the South, laws called "Black Codes" were created. These "codes" made it punishable by imprisonment and indentured servitude for African Americans to loiter, be unemployed, be drunk, or be in debt. The "Black Codes" were a very blatant form of racial profiling aimed at maintaining an unpaid labor pool in the South in the early post-slavery days.

Today, young men of color are targeted because the system needs to keep a potentially explosive section of the working and oppressed classes under control. After the post-World War II economic boom, the ruling class cracked down on Labor and gutted social spending in order to maintain their profits. The harshest consequences of this program are experienced by low-wage workers and unemployed youth, predominantly Latinos and African American. Their poverty starkly contrasts with the spectacle of opulence and the myths of social mobility and opportunity in the US.

Therefore, from the ruling class's perspective, these groups must be constantly undermined, divided, intimidated, attacked, imprisoned, discredited, and ultimately kept in check with naked force in the form of a lethal injection or a police bullet. Young people of color are thus made scapegoats for the problems created by the ruling class. Rape, gangs, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, muggings, child abuse, unemployment-all these are ascribed to their personal moral flaws, which contributes to the social perception of criminality, which fuels the police tactic of profiling.