The Roots of Racial Profiling

How old is racial profiling?

The Free Negro Registry was a means of identifying and tracking so-called Free Persons of Color. In colonial Virginia, all Free Persons of Color were required to show identification to any white person on demand. After the Civil War, the laws were reversed, but only to be revived in 1880 as the Jim Crow laws (named after a black minstrel character). Many of the Jim Crow laws were repealed during the 1960's Civil Rights movement; however, they are resurfacing again in the guise of racial profiling.

Although racial profiling is not backed by written statutes, its roots are in the laws enacted during colonial times. Racial profiling, for want of a better term, is a Gateway Act -- an excuse used to approach citizens assumed to be criminals.

Take the stories of Mary and Patty Bowden, mulatto indentured servants born in the mid-eighteenth century to George Washington's family. At the age of seven, Mary was profiled and taken to court by Augustine Washington Senior (George Washington's father). At court, she was judged to be mulatto, sentenced to a thirty-year indenture, and was ordered to serve her indenture with Washington. Because of her mixed race status, Mary had no rights in her community. Today , because of their appearance and ethnicity, citizens are being stopped, searched, and arrested. Were Mary to return to modern-day America she might pause to wonder if she was in the 18th century, not the 21st.

The Free Negro Registry required registration every three years in the Virginia counties and cities. The minimum recorded information included the age, name, color and stature, by whom and in what court the said Negro, or mulatto, was emancipated. Most registrations went further and recorded skin color (dark or light mulatto), hair texture and color (straight, kinky, red, or black), height, marks or colors, and the names of parents. The Free Negro Registry was a means to restrict the coming and going of Negroes in colonial Virginia and other parts of the South.

Today almost every adult is required to carry some form of identification. If you are stopped, and do not have identification, you can be taken to a police station. What were the consequences of failing to carry the required papers during colonial period? For Free Persons of Color, the worst-case scenario was being sold into slavery. Or they could be thrown in jail until a white person came forward on their behalf.

Today, if a citizen is pulled over on a traffic stop, and cannot show proper identification, the outcome is left to the discretion of the officer. Not only can the driver be questioned and detained, the passengers and the car can be searched. If you are a member of a targeted group, you may be taken to the station, and held there until you are cleared. That probably sounds foreign to those who have never had the experience, but in many areas it is a common occurrence.

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every citizen equal protection under the law. It states (in Section 1):

All well and good for those who can afford to go to court and prove their rights were violated; however, many people do not have the resources or the time to do this.

Because there is an outcry from the American Civil Liberties Union, and other civil rights organizations, racial profiling may decline. Nonetheless, like many practices that are not codified in law, but are understood, racial profiling may at some future date be resurrected under another name. Every American should be concerned when our rights are chipped away, laws are set aside, and citizens are detained. Until there is some type of referendum and a movement to abolish laws that target some citizens and not others, whether these laws are written or unwritten, we will remain a country stuck in the past.