I know this is a bit of thread-necro, but I didn't know where else to put this.

Colorado State "Racial Profiling" Incident

The gist of the story is that two Native American high school students, both male, drove to Colorado State University for a campus tour, as they both had intentions of attending the school.  They were late and missed the start of the tour, and when they joined the tour in progress, the mother of another student on the tour called the police, saying that these two individuals made her "nervous".  Officers responded and pulled them aside, forcing them to miss the remainder of the tour., and critics are already calling this another incidence of "racial profiling".

The school has responded with a public statement reading "As a university community, we deeply regret the experience of these students while they were guests on our campus.  The fact that these two students felt unwelcome on our campus while here as visitors runs counter to our principles of community.  We want to reiterate our commitment to ensuring our public universities are open and welcoming to all students and hope that the young men will not be deterred in their pursuit of attending college in Colorado, a traditional homeland to many tribal nations."

While what happened to them is unfortunate, I don't see how this falls into "racial profiling".  Another individual, who is well within their rights to have feelings of her own, said she felt "nervous" by these two young men joining the tour late.  How is that racial profiling, unless she specifically said, in her communication with the police, that is was because of their ethnicity that she was nervous?

At my company, I have to go through HR diversity, anti-discrimination, and anti-harassment training, and we have it drummed into our heads that in instances of harassment and discrimination, it isn't the intent of the sender that matters but rather how the receiver interprets the message, meaning what I believe to be an innocuous statement, if interpreted by another person as harassment, can be grounds for discipline.  Their feelings matter above all else, no matter what my intentions were. 

If that is how society wants to treat people, then how is this mother's "nervous" feeling wrong?  Could she have handled it differently, maybe not called the cops and just moved away from the two youths if it was that big an issue?  Sure, but why does she have to put how she feels aside if it truly made her nervous?  Don't her feelings matter, or is it because they were minorities (and although the story doesn't explicitly state it, I'll bet anything she is Caucasian) and she isn't, her feelings automatically become null and void because they get trumped by someone else's status?  Maybe she had a legitimate reason for those feelings, and while one can claim that it's profiling or stereotyping, perhaps there was trauma that caused them, which is a little harder to "just get over".

It's a slippery slope we're headed down, because once people are told what they can and can't feel toward others, particularly if it is based on identity politics, we're getting into thought police territory.  

This hideous, repugnant and thoroughly reprehensible ideology is indeed becoming the norm, and I see in it the worst imaginable perversion of what were initially good intentions. It’s as if we have taken the basic and decent principle that we shouldn’t use violence against one another and have twisted it into a shameful parody of itself, and into a system where any slight, real or imagined, must be considered an actionnable offence. That’s precisely the kind of nightmare scenario that currently makes the Left so unpalatable to many voters who’d rather not vote for people like Trump but who see his side as the only way to escape the Orwellian nightmare of a society where you can be tried and found guilty not for what you have done, but for what someone feels about you. As a progressive, I shudder to see how all the genuinely positive aspects of the Left will now be swept away with this kind of touchy-feely rubbish.

That lady should have been told “those guys make you uncomfortbale? Oh, have they done anything? No? Then, ma’am, there’s no reason for you to feel uncomfortable, is there?” I don’t know if those two fellows were victim of racial discrimination, but they certainly were the victims of sensitivity run amuck and of a shameful and cowardly behaviour by complicit authorities.



We are already there, I’m afraid, and if we don’t want this insane trend to become permanent, we must be quite vocal about our disagreement with it.

Yeah, I'm with Slam on this one; also, I would add the point that she could have first approached the individual guiding the tour and asking if the two young gentlemen were supposed to be there or not. Instead, she immediately calls the police - and that's the real "police" problem I see here, just like the recent incidents pointed out in the article, with the police being called to deal with non-white people sitting in a coffee shop or playing golf too slowly.
And sorry, but the victims in this specific case are two teenage boys who were made to feel like crap, and basically punished, for being exactly where they were supposed to that day and doing absolutely nothing wrong, and not the woman who felt "nervous" and is being called out for over-reacting.

But the problem is that people aren't simply "suggesting" there's a racial component to it but rather flatly stating that this is "racial profiling" without having all of the details. They're assigning sinister motive without having any knowledge of the actual reasons.

IRT the bolded part, that was not in the original story I linked to, and as I wrote, the initial story said she felt "nervous" about their presence, which could be based on any number of things, not necessarily their race. If this new information is true, then she is fully in the wrong for making that assumption.

It's from the police report, obtained by the AP, She told the dispatcher, "They are not, definitely not, a part of the tour." and  that they were"lying the whole time," but could not offer specifics to support her claim to the dispatcher despite multiple questions. Like the Starbucks incident there is no other reason for this to have escalated other than their race.

That's not surprising to me in the least, but then I have long known that a meritocracy is mostly a myth perpetuated by folks who have a vested interest in hereditary wealth and power matriculating over the generations. Just by observation you can notice what children of the wealthy get into. Now supposedly the U.S. was founded in revolt against a nepotistic class system, but really it was founded by a lot of second or third etc. sons who stood little chance of success in the old hierarchy but they based a lot of their new nation on that same old boys' club, it's just one where King George was excluded and someone's money was good at their bar.

No offense to those where who have gone the college and thesis writing route, I've either got grade 10 or grade 8 according to my official records, you either had parents with money or parents who sacrificed a lot. I came from smoking, drinking, gambling nobody in the immediate blood family finished highschool/grade 12 and many were 'yer on your own at 16 kid'. I know how many doors are forever closed, and I got lots of As in school and on the honour roll in two subjects. I don't begrudge it to anyone who had the privilege because they didn't make the system up, or even their grandfathers, it's older than that... only if they pull the I did it all myself by bootstraps and haven't come anywhere near close to that, and I have met some who really have and they are nothing like some of the hot air merchants who get all puffed up about being self-made but aren't.

There's a very wealthy man out here with a lot of money, he's not a bad guy at all, he doesn't blow his own horn, but sometimes there have been people, especially in government to the right, who blew it for him a lot. he's actually a sort of distant in-law and I know stuff. In the early '50s his Mom knew a banker who swung him a $5,000 interest free loan to start a car dealership. We'll never know the exact reason for that, maybe she had something on the banker or he owed her somehow... but think about it... not a lot of people could get a loan that size (we're talking 1950 dollars) with little collateral of their own or fresh out of high school never mind no interest. And at the start of the 1950s, the big post war car sales boom! So there you have birth, location and time coming together, not genius particularly of a genetic or any other kind. But some will put it all down to one or another. He put in a lot of work, but in say the 1970s the same work or an adjusted for inflation loan wouldn't have meant the same result. It just is what it is. It's a combination of factors and ultimately if you are born starving in Africa it's really not because like Oprah says you drew negative things to yourself, or think positively enough like she did.

I'm old enough to see thing repeating, or rhyming as Twain had it, and this is an old old story. Academia is a bubble of mainly high bred people, and sometimes also those taken in from the developing world from where some of them might be most needed. My gorge doth not rise at it anymore than at some woman on welfare claiming extra food stamps, it's all relative. Just make sure when you use what you've got it's not just for some temporary ego boost, or you might be better just trying to get in Jeopardy.

Pretty bad? Not quite, for me it ranks below the recent finding that when sets of identical twins sent in their swabs to one of these genealogy by mail services they got back different ancestry charts!