The Dower Power Hour

I failed to get through “Yellow: Between Black and White.” It was thoughtful and made some good points, but I just couldn’t get involved enough to will myself to sit down and finish it. I got about 2/3 of the way there though and picked up some interesting analysis along the way.

One of the more provoking bits of the book had to do with racial profiling. He made an interesting statistical argument against it which I will now summarize.

Lets say you have a community which contains 1,000 people, 900 people with blue eyes and 100 people with green eyes. Both groups commit exactly the same number of crimes per person (not per group.) But for some reason there is a rumor that green eyed people are crafty and less trustworthy and commit more crimes. So the Chief of Police commits more than 10% of her police force to watching the green eyed people, say 15%. As a result of this disproportionate police distribution they catch more green eyed criminals. This has nothing to do with green eyed characteristics, but the extra police force makes them more effective at catching that minority in the act.

This result confirms the stereotype and so the Chief commits even more of her police force to watch green eyed people, after all, surface level analysis indicates they commit a disproportionate amount of crimes. Soon 20% of the police force is watch 10% of the population, and sure enough although blue eyed people are still committing more crimes overall, more green eyed people are arrested than their numbers would indicate. Pretty soon, the police chief has 75% of her police force looking for green eyed people and the records show that they are committing nearly half the crimes in the city, even though they are only 10% of the population.

I think you understand the folly of this logic and how it might be affecting our society today. This story is probably the most compelling argument against racial profiling that I’ve ever heard. The stuff about how damaging it is to the victims psyche and how it might actually compel them to confirm the stereotype is certainly interesting. But this self-fulfilling prophecy that could apply to literally any categorization of people - that really made me question the validity of this practice, at least in some cases.