Originally Posted by Quovatis
Nobody really understands what it means now and throws it around like a battle cry. And yeah profiling does not equal racism.
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Actually, I think you too are confused. You define racism as pure racial hatred/superiority believes. Racism however, is the assigning a person traits whether positive, neutral or negative based on this person's race alone.
The problem is that racial selection is a form of racial discrimination. So is racial hatred (that which you define as racism). The latter though is simply an extreme form of racism, typically combined with extreme nationalism.
The consequences, motives and intentions are different, but in the end you are making a racial discriminating pre-selection within a group based on superficial qualities where skin colour is a race trait, not a social-economic trait. Even more accurately, racial profiling typically involves creating racial stereotypes to make the "bias" a bit more refinement. It is still a bias.
It would make more sense for crime fighting to focus on social-economic qualities, such as people with lacking incomes, high debts, bad household live etc. That's however harder to do based on superficial qualities than skincolour.
So yes, it's racist to some degree, even if just with the intend to increase efficiency due to a majority of a certain group being in that social-economic circumstance.
Of course it's insulting to people that are on the edge of the racial stereotype to be included in the stereotype and suffer under those that actually are the target group of the profiling. To them, I can well imagine it coming over as racist. Especially if they used to feel prosecuted as a group by that same entity or institute, in this case the police and governments of Southern States. They're not treated as individuals, after all.