Lauren Cohen

Dr. Harris Cox

ENGL 1011 H03

27 September 2018

? ¿Profiling to Benefit Security¿?

Being racist is okay if you are determining beauty. Being racist is okay if you want to

seem better than other people. Being racists is okay if it is to benefit your safety. Is it okay to

judge people based off their skin color? That’s what Dana Lind believes. In the article, “Feds:

Racial Profiling is bad... except at the airport and the border,” Dana Lind talks about the new

standards of allowed racial profiling. She presents the new case that explains how racial profiling

is allowed at the border and in airports. She defines the key terms of profiling, security, and the

standards. She includes graphs of the US and pictures of people in airports and at the border.

Dana Lind’s article makes people want to racially profile for their safety through methods of

bandwagon and conjunction of pathos and kairos; It is important analyze these arguments, so

people will realize the negative effect of their choices on others.

BEHIND THE MIX

Dana Lind is a senior reporter for Vox magazine. She has covered stories about Canadian

immigration and about police shootings. Lind also made a show with her other colleagues called

Weeds. I question whether she was assigned to write on this topic or if she chose this topic out of

her own interest. Vox is a news site for the 21st century. They post a lot of articles for a wide

variety of subjects. They have a lot of ads on their website. Since the advertisements can divert
people's attention from the articles, it can suggest that the website should not be taken seriously

due to the distraction and bringing loss of interest on the topics posted. The audience for the

article would most likely be for the people who fear their safety from the terrorist attacks and

immigration problems. The article is written to sooth the peoples feeling and make them feel safe

from a new method of protection.

KAIROS TO BUILD PATHOS

Lind’s article has a great use of kairos. The article was published in early December of

the year 2014. During that year, many shooting and terrorist threats happened in the USA such

as: Overland Park Jewish Community Center, the Las Vegas Shooting, and many shootings by

the sole participant Ali Muhammad Brown. Another most important event that happened in 2014

was the American immigration crisis. There were many numbers of unaccompanied women and

children coming into the United States from the northern part of Central America. Therefore, at

the time, many people feared the “national security” of the United States. This would make the

argument seem strong in the sense of relating to the situation at hand.

The strongest method that Dana Lind used was relating the content to create pathos based

off the kairos of the argument. Since many shootings and illegal immigration happened during

that time, bringing up the argument itself is sensitive for people. The argument makes people

think about how their country could be vulnerable and needs protection. She also inserted a

photograph of many people in the security checkpoint line at the airport.

This photo shows women with their children and older people.
 The image builds emotion on the audience to

want to feel secure. It makes them accept the idea of

racial profiling because it will keep them and their

country safe. When she uses this method of making

people believe racial profiling is okay, it could be

manipulative. It may be making people go against their beliefs of treating everyone equally

because they fear their own safety within the country. It could also be a downfall because it

makes people not think about how the other people are treated because they would only be

focused on their own safety.

LOGOS

Another main approach by the author was the format of the article to make it simple for

the audience. The type of media, being an article posted on an online magazine website, was

already made to reach a mass group of people. Lind makes it easier by formatting the article in a

question-answer style. For the section headings, she presents bolded questions, then proceeds to

answer and explain the questions underneath. The questions, such as: “Why does the federal

government allow profiling at all?", "What were the old federal standards for racial

profiling?”, “What has changed under the new standards?” and “So when is profiling still

allowed?”, are questions that the readers would ask in their own head. In a way, this is a tactic of

logic because the audience would see the answers to the questions as a logical standpoint which

in return would make people further accept racial profiling since they are getting solid answers.

Relating to the previous approach, a method Dana Lind used was using the questions to

also establish formal definitions. The questions help define the words “profiling”, “standards",

and “area of allowed profiling.” The “old standards” she defined were from the policy put out by
the “Bush administration in 2003.” Her definition of “profiling” was listed on the first page as

“being allowed to consider religion, national origin, gender and gender identity or sexual

orientation when deciding to investigate someone.” To explain the”areas of allowed profiling”

she used a graph. Instead of straight out giving the definition, she bolds the questions and words

to draw attention to the them and follow up by explaining the meaning of the context in her own

view. This is another partial appeal of logos because it makes the audience logically think about

the definitions to draw a conclusion on their idea about racial profiling.

Although the previous methods were partial in

relating with the appeal logos. Dana Lind had two obvious

examples of logos in her argument. She provides two

graphs of the United States. One graph shows the “Free

Zone of the United States.” At the bottom of the graph, it

states the statistic that “2 out of 3 Americans (197.4 million people) live within 100 miles of the

US land and coastal boarders.” The purpose of her graph is to say that even though majority of

the population in the United States does not live in a zone that allows racial profiling, they are all

surrounded by it which would give people more of a reason to use it because of the bandwagon

effect. The other graph shows the states that do not ban racial profiling. Twenty American states

do not ban racial profiling. Even though it is not majority of the country, it still means a lot of the

people in America can racially profile and get away with it. It persuades more people to do it

because they do not feel they will get in trouble. The bad part of the logos presented is that it is a

stacking the deck fallacy. In the book, Everything’s an Argument, Lunsford defines stacking the

deck as when” writers show only one side of the story” (Lunsford 79). This logos appeal is this

fallacy because Lind does not give the audience a solid fact of how racial profiling does work. It
only gives the audience a reason of why they should do it but no results to show the positive

effect on the nation from doing it.

ETHOS LEADING TO BANDWAGON EFFECT

Majority of the argument is produced with the appeal of ethos. The use of the word

"“federal” and mentioning major legal stances like “Department of Justice” and “Border Control

Agents” are well used through the paper. She uses many pictures of the airport, one showing the

TSA agents in their uniforms with their badges to show the real people who will be doing racial

profiling. She also brings in the names of President Bush administration, Supreme Court, and

Sherriff Joe Arpaio of a county in the border zones that allow racial profiling. This stong reliance

on ethos is a bandwagon effect because it can persuade people to believe that racially profiling

people is acceptable if the federal government does it themselves. This pushes the audience to try

racial profiling for the excuse that the federal people are doing it, so they should as well to

protect their own security. Since bandwagon appeals “push people to take the easier path”

(Lunsford 75) they don’t think about their own choices of what to do. In this situation, people

who appeal to the bandwagon will just follow the group to racially profile, but then not consider

how it could be going against their own views.

National security is a huge concern for people. Dana Lind presents her argument based

on a bandwagon effect and using the timely fear from events that happened to make people

accept racial profiling. Are you that scared of your safety that you want to treat others differently

based off their race? Do you want to contribute to the bandwagon or do you want to make a

difference in society?
 Works Cited

Lind, Dana. “Feds: Racial profiling is bad... except at airport and the border.” Vox, 24 Dec. 2014,

https://www.vox.com/2014/12/8/7351285/racial-profiling Accessed 20 Sept. 2018.

Lunsford, Andrea A. and Ruszkiewicz, John J. Everything’s an Argument. 7 th ed., Bedford/St.

Martin’s, 2016