is racial profiling "racist"?

A provocative piece that clarifies a sensitive topic from Walter Williams at TownHall.com...

Labor economists talk about two types of discrimination:

1.) personal discrimination-- i.e., bigotry/favoritism based on personal "preferences"; and

2.) statistical discrimination-- i.e., stereotypes: decisions based on [necessary] ignorance, looking for the most "productive" decision, relying on group info about individuals in the face of information limits.

Here, Williams speaks in relatively technical/econ/jargon-y terms in dealing with the irony that racial distinctions can come from either motivation and serve either end.

Harvard Professor Henry Gates' arrest has given new life to the issue of racial profiling. We can think of profiling in general as a practice where people use an observable or known physical attribute as a proxy or estimator of some other unobservable or unknown attribute. Race or sex profiling is simply the use of race or sex as that estimator. Profiling represents mankind's attempt to cope with information cost. God would not have to profile since God is all knowing.

People differ by race and sex. Let's look at a few profiling examples to see which ones you'd like outlawed. According to the American Cancer Society, the lifetime risk of men getting breast cancer is about 1/10th of 1 percent, or 1 in 1,000; and 440 men will die of breast cancer this year. For women, the risk of developing breast cancer is about 12 percent, or 1 in 8, and 40,610 will die from it this year. Should doctors and medical insurance companies be prosecuted for the discriminatory practice of routine breast cancer screening for women but not for men?

Some racial and ethnic groups have higher incidence and mortality from various diseases than the national average....

Knowing patient race or ethnicity, what might be considered as racial profiling, can assist medical providers in the delivery of more effective medical services....

One might take the position that while it is acceptable for doctors to use race, ethnicity and sex as indicators of the higher probability of certain diseases, it is not acceptable to use race or ethnicity as indicators for other attributes such as criminal behavior. Other than simply stating that it is acceptable to use race or ethnicity as information acquisition technique in the case of medicine but not in other areas of life, is there really a difference? Surely, race and ethnicity are not perfect indicators of the risk of prostate cancer or hypertension; neither are they perfect indicators of criminal behavior; however, there are concrete factual data that surely indicate associations....

Williams continues with examples of cabbies and pizza deliverers engaging in data-based racial profiling, before exiting with this classic quote from the Rev. Jesse Jackson from a decade ago:

"There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."