Student Blogger - #13Amend Live Blog: Racial Profiling

Professor Robert Gooding-Williams provided critiques of the four papers of the last panel; I will focus on his critique of Professor Carter's presentation. Carter relies on two propositions: that unconscious biases exist and that they exemplify historical stigmatization. For the first proposition, Gooding-Williams contended that Carter needed more psychological evidence; an alternative assumption, which Gooding-Williams proposes but does not defend, is that racial profilers believe that race is an accurate statistical predictor of criminality. Thus, it could be conscious rationality at work rather than unconscious biases. For the second proposition, some mechanism is needed to show why discrimination now stems from slavery about 150 years ago. I do not think that the second problem is decisive; discrimination now seems to extend from a line of mistreatment stretching back to our history of slavery, so some mechanism must surely exist.