Intimate Decisions: Racial Profiling after September 11 and in the Case of Wen Ho Lee

[T]he category of men who formulate claims, and everything else, the men who have the monopoly of language, is a category of privileged people.

Simone Weil

This article argues for a more intimate1 representation of minority groups by the media, focusing on the case of Wen Ho Lee. It outlines the role of intimacy in the formation of moral and legal judgments. In arguments against racial profiling, descriptions for the need for intimacy may supplement the rights-based approach,² while demonstrating the flaws in utilitarianism or rationality arguments. The article will focus on the peripheral moral culture created by the media and community activists that may have an impact on the formation or enforcement of existing law.³ It asserts also that peripheral cultures, journalists, and media must be managed so that individual rights, and individuals themselves, are not trampled. The article endorses an activist mindset among judges and jurors, imaginative rulings, and the production of narratives—by writers or scholars—that originate from the local or intimate.⁴

Aliens at Large

Why THEY Hate US. Cover, Newsweek, October 15, 2000.⁵

In the late sixties, in a small town 20 miles south of Greenville, South Carolina, an African American woman working for a white couple discovers two Klansmen hoods while housecleaning.⁶ Despite sharing a common space for a significant time period, the white couple had internalized a contradiction. The woman moves among intimate rooms and customs but can still be the target, along with her minority community, of a legal white supremacist organization to which they belong. This example seems to imply that intimacy and cruelty coexist and prompts a refinement of the notion of intimacy. I write that intimacy erodes cruelty, if it is truly intimacy, which should necessarily predicate the possibility of friendship or a relationship in which two or more parties respectfully regard each other as deserving compassion. Its presence reduces the potential for barbarism and cruelty or substantially lowers it.⁷ In this case, can we say that the housecleaner has an intimate relationship with this family at the juncture of this discovery, even if she has been employed within the house—an intimate space—for a substantial period of time? Probably not. This example demonstrates the difference between rights and intimacy. Much of what creates and preserves intimacy is not simply its legally coded protection but a form of superperceptiveness and consciousness of language, a sense of others as individuals rather than synecdoches.

When media pipelines characterize someone as criminal, they automatically create the possibility of treating that person as undeserving of compassion. In the area of racial profiling, major media pipelines cast Arab Americans as criminals or potentially dangerous, and after 2001 they have been negligent in providing an account of Arab Americans as the subject of hate crimes.⁸ They have not been self-consciously writing about the phenomenon of racial profiling and have, thus, cultivated an atmosphere where racial profiling can exist without critique.

The media has a responsibility to uphold the constitutional ideology of "We the people." In other words, they have a duty to represent the details of individual situations rather than reproduce stereotypes: with full histories defending their intellectual, spiritual, and historical worth. But the media has reflected only the tyranny of the majority voice over the minority one.

Since September 11, several hate crimes have been reported by small newspapers and international publications, in ink and digital forms.⁹ But major newspapers have barely reported the scattered, but definitively reactive racial hate crimes occurring across the United States.¹⁰ These hate crimes have ranged from the kamikaze crash of a car into a mosque; an assault on an Arab American shopkeeper into whose eyes bleach was thrown;¹¹ and the stabbing of a Latino who was mistaken for an Arab. A great number have been reported in small newspapers or foreign presses despite being absent in the reportage of larger newspapers.¹²

Within weeks of the event, no timely print coverage of hate crimes by major media...