Question

Based on the article "Proxy War," create your own argument that either supports or counters the author's argument (you either agree with the author's conclusion [support his argument] or you disagree with the author's conclusion [counter his argument]).

• Be sure you are not just developing your argument with the opinion that you already have. This means you must first recognize your initial point of view and your own assumptions about the topic, so you can approach it with an open mind and not have your initial opinion cloud your judgment and your argument.
• The reasons the author presents to support his claim-found by words that identify reasons or because they answer WHY the author wants us to accept his/her conclusion. After identifying the reasons the author used to support his claim, ask yourself:
  • Are the type of reasons he uses strong or weak? See Google slides below that I created about the strengths and weaknesses of each type of reason.
  • Are the reasons presented logical?
  • Why should I believe the author's stance?
• Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the author's argument because you already agree or disagree with his stance, or are you looking beyond your personal stance and only evaluating the author's argument? Review video from lecture to help you think things through.
• Be sure to provide a strong argument by avoiding the pitfalls of using your own personal experience or the experiences of others, your emotions, and your opinions. Your argument should focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence the author used to support his argument.
• Your argument should be thoughtful, well-written, and original in terms of reasons and reasoning. It must be a minimum of 500-words, and it must include the following elements for the ESSAY portion with the following headings:
  • The article's issue (written as a question)
  • The article's conclusion (author's conclusion)
  • Your conclusion
  • Reasons to support your stance on the article's issue

Please give original work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Proxy War

Liberals denounce racial profiling. Conservatives denounce affirmative action. What’s the difference?

In Brent Staples’ memoir Parallel Time, he recounts a game he used to play while a student at the University of Chicago. Staples, who is black, would pace the streets surrounding the campus after dark. When he spied a white couple strolling toward him arm in arm, he would walk directly at them, at a normal pace. The couple would first tighten their grip on each other. Then, as Staples continued to head toward them, they would panic, release their grip, and scurry apart. Staples would breeze between them, without losing a step, without looking back. He called it “scattering the pigeons.”

The “pigeons” feared Staples because of his blackness–they were using his race as a proxy for potential criminality. Using superficial traits to infer deeper characteristics in people is common and need not be racist. Generalizing from what is easily and quickly knowable to something that is hard to know for sure is what economists think of as minimizing information costs. If the clouds turn dark and ominous and it starts to thunder while you’re out for a stroll, you can find a phone and call the weather service, or you can ignore them on the grounds that predictions about the weather are often wrong, or you can take cover under the assumption that it’s probably going to rain. But using race as a proxy is sensitive, for good and obvious reasons.

If skin color as a proxy for criminal intentions were a precise tool–that is, if every young black man strolling the sidewalks were a mugger–it would be hard to criticize. And if the implied generalization had no validity–if a young black male was no more likely to be a mugger than anyone else approaching on the sidewalk–it would be easy to label as racist. But, like most such generalizations, it is valid but not perfect. A young black man is more likely to be a mugger than a young white man–but the assumption that any particular young black man is a mugger will usually be wrong. So is using race as a proxy racist?

This is what the current “racial profiling” controversy is about. Racial profiling is when police use race as a reason to search someone’s car or to frisk a pedestrian. Almost all black men have tales of being stopped by a cop for no reason other than their skin color. It’s derisively known as “DWB”: the crime of driving while black. Earlier this year the governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, fired the state police superintendent for telling a journalist that blacks were more likely to commit crimes than whites. But she has since admitted that state police systematically stop cars simply because the driver is black. And racial profiling has many defenders who say it is sensible, hard-nosed policing of the sort that has led to a dramatic drop in the nation’s crime rate.

O ne generalization that can be made about racial profiling–a valid but not perfect generalization, of course–is that conservatives tend to support it, while liberals tend to regard it as racist. In another controversy, the one over affirmative action, the opposite generalization holds: Liberals tend to support it, while conservatives tend to regard it as reverse racism.

And yet affirmative action and racial profiling are essentially the same. Affirmative action amounts to the use of race as a proxy for other, harder-to-discern qualities: racial victimization, poverty, cultural deprivation. Few critics of affirmative action are against compensating victims of specific and proven acts of racial discrimination. And the critics often positively endorse programs giving a special break to people who’ve overcome economic or cultural disadvantage. What they object to is generalizing these conditions from a person’s race. Defenders of affirmative action say, in essence, that as policy-making generalizations go, this one is overwhelmingly valid–and that more justice will be lost than gained by insisting on scientific precision.

Defenders of affirmative action and defenders of racial profiling even resort to the same dodge in defending their cause against colorblind absolutists. They say they, too, think it’s wrong for a person to be promoted and/or arrested just because of his or her race. But, they say, it’s OK for race to be one factor among many.

Here is Gov. Whitman, quoted in the New York Times Magazine last month, explaining the difference between profiling (good) and racial profiling (bad):

Profiling means a police officer using cumulative knowledge and training to identify certain indicators of possible criminal activity. Race may be one of those factors, but it cannot stand alone. Racial profiling is when race is the only other factor. There’s no other probable cause.

This precisely echoes Justice Lewis Powell’s famous explanation of permissible affirmative action in the 1978 Bakke case:

Ethnic diversity is only one element in a range of factors a university properly may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous student body. … In [a constitutional] admissions program, race or ethnic background may be deemed a “plus” in a particular applicant file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats.

The factor fudge satisfies some critics, but it doesn’t solve the racial proxy dilemma. Stopping and frisking a driver or admitting a student to Yale is a yes-or-no decision. As legal scholar Randall Kennedy wrote in his book Race, Crime, and the Law, “Even if race is only one of several factors behind a decision, tolerating it at all means tolerating it as potentially the decisive factor.” When it’s the decisive factor, it might as well have been the only factor. If it’s never decisive, it’s not really a factor at all.

he main difference between affirmative action and racial profiling is that one singles out blacks for something desirable and the other singles them out for something undesirable. Reasonable people can differ about whether using race as a proxy is OK. Obviously it depends on how valid the generalization is in any given case, and how costly or impractical it would be to get alternative information. When you fear a man approaching you may be a mugger, you may not be able to find out in the next five seconds whether he happens to be a University of Chicago intellectual headed for the New York Times editorial board. On the other hand, race is not just any proxy, and probably should be used more sparingly–especially by the government–than the narrow logic of probabilities would justify.

Racial proxies are a tough call. But it’s safe to say that anyone who is outraged by racial profiling but tolerates affirmative action, or vice versa, has got it wrong.

Answer 1

The categories of explanation the author has used are fundamentally solid. He explained the real situation in respect to ethnic discrimination as justification for illegal motives inherent in culture. The explanations given for racial discrimination and criminal intent proxy are illogical, because there is no proven research or philosophy that promotes bias to determine criminal motives. The viewpoint of the author may be trusted as understanding of ethnic bias and representation of illegal behavior is widespread in culture. Black americans are perceived as the person that is usually active in illegal activity relative to white men. And the law-formulating organizations have a perception that relates a person's features to their illegal activity. I completely disagree with the speaker, and believe strongly that an individual's personal trait has little to do with the individual's intentions. To order to be able to quantify the presence and degree of racial discrimination of a certain nature to a given social or economic sphere, a hypothesis (or definition or model) about how such discrimination might arise and what its consequences could be is essential. The hypothesis or model, in effect, determines the data used to validate the hypothesis, the techniques necessary to evaluate the data, And the conclusions that would match the evidence and study in order to justify a conclusion of discrimination. Analysts will perform experiments without such a hypothesis and do not have interpretable effects and do not hold up to stringent scrutiny. Most people's definition of racial prejudice requires overt, clear animosity against representatives of a weaker ethnic community demonstrated by the whites. But prejudice can entail more than just overt action (such as job refusal or renting opportunities); it may even be indirect and implicit (such as nonverbal body aggression or voice tone). In comparison, prejudice against an individual might be focused on general stereotypes regarding representatives of a marginalized minority community expected to extend to that person ( i.e. ethnic prejudice or profiling). Discrimination can often stem from systemic rather than human behaviors. Verbal antagonism includes frequent racial remarks and discrediting racist statements, either inside or without the context of the goal. These remarks can not be regarded by themselves as severe enough to be unconstitutional (balanced against questions of freedom of speech), but represent a direct form of animosity.