Following up on last week’s theme of breaking with the traditional Odyssey topics, I’m going to do something new. Every week I’m going to pick two ideas, theories or world views and try to explain them as best as I can and leave the conclusion open ended. I’m not the greatest at hiding my opinions so you’ll most likely be able to tell which I prefer, but I strive to be as objective as possible. Here we go.

Some of you may have heard about the churchgoer in Upstate New York that called the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after they saw two Muslim students visiting Sunday services. The students were older than traditional college age (18-22) and were part of a sociology of religion class that required them to attend a house of worship from a different faith tradition: a laudable goal by any measure. They attended Browncroft Community Church in Penfield, NY, minutes away from downtown Rochester.

I grew up in this church.

The story got some Internet attention from The Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, and The Independent, for obvious reasons. On the surface the optics are hauntingly terrible; to make matters worse, another student from the same class went to a later service and no alarms were raised. To make matters better, the two Muslim students had gone to the same church earlier in the semester without incident.

I am not going to use this as a case study but as a launching pad. The battle between profiling and discrimination has been raging since 9-11 and, at least in my life and over the years, when I’ve asked myself which side I fall on, I’ve come to different answers.

These are the best arguments I have come up with for either side; please let me know if I’ve accurately represented your viewpoint or bastardized it in some way out of an implicit bias.

Profiling

Profiling is a tool used not only be law enforcement, but by everyday people trying to get through the day efficiently. When you walk into a bank, do you go up to the teller with a furrowed brow, slouched against the counter and moving in a harried motion, or do you go to the person standing upright, with bright eyes and a smile on your face? In a grocery store, would you go the cashier who looks bored out of their mind and has his or her mouth set in a permanently shut grimace, or the one who is chatting to his or her customers in an animated way? Assuming there is no self-checkout, of course, since that is always the best option.

Profiling is an innate human response that we should use to our advantage, rather than locking it in a cage; it is the process of observing physical and behavioral characteristics, rationally analyzing them and coming to informed conclusions. How is that process different from deductive reasoning?

Discrimination

Discrimination in general gets a bad rep. Rhetorically, it simply means choosing one option over another because of some characteristic. No one is fighting against logical, rational, decision making. Discrimination becomes an issue when one group, normally a minority, comes out on the losing side of that equation, usually because of an underlying bias. Americans have been socially conditioned through the media and grand historical events to connect terrorist with Muslim. This is not the public’s fault. When you’re born, you don’t get to choose the culture or the home you grow up in. However, when you’re an adult and on your own, you must decide what you believe and stand for. It is up to you to root out unintentional biases in your worldview.

Profiling becomes discrimination when those biases are allowed to bloom and people of different, ethnic or religious groups don’t start at the same level. In the United States, Muslims start closer to the terrorist threshold than white people or Christians. The harmful effects of such categorization, not to mention it's moral reprehensibility, are daunting.

Do the benefits of profiling outweigh the negatives of discrimination? Can we have profiling without harmful discrimination? I don’t know.