The Real Heroine of Fairy Tales Donna
Donna Lee Fields 264 Rhymes with ‘Bitch’: The Real Heroine of Fairy Tales Donna Lee Fields (Universitat International Valenciana) Profiling. Usually associated with criminal or racial profiling. Police detaining suspects on the basis of skin color, race, dress, or apparently suspicious actions. Stored in their minds from repetitive briefings, they have specific images and a list of characteristics that direct them towards singling out probable provocateurs, people they are paid and sworn to get off the street. But what seems, at first, like a reasonable missive can quickly become macabre. Our minds flit to the only some of the repercussions this profiling has caused, such as the thousands of citizens of Japanese descent singled out and imprisoned for years in concentration camps in the United States during World War II, the treatment of the French police toward Algerian immigrants in the 1960s; the photos of Steve Biko and Rodney King after being brutalized by police; the daily battle between the British and the Irish, and of course, any man of Middle Eastern descent in this day and age, who needs to think twice about entering most public buildings. Profiling is, in fact, another way of saying “prejudice”, though connotation is everything in this age of “military action” versus “war”, and “permissible force” rather than “physical abuse”. We are all guilty of profiling and much more than we may want to admit. We judge people on the basis of their title, their clothes, their skin color, their professions. And though many of us will be fortunate enough never to be on the wrong side of its violent consequences, we are programmed and influenced by its long-reaching tentacles, though we be conscious of it or not.
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