The issue to be analyzed herein centers on the process of how a social problem emerges and becomes a part of the social agenda in a country. The specific problem to be considered is the recent profiling and interviewing of Middle Eastern students living and studying in the United States.
Racial profiling had typically been understood in the United States as centered upon law enforcement apprehension of African-Americans in general and African-Americans in particular. Kenneth Meeks (2000), in an analysis of racial profiling that targeted African-Americans, argued that at the heart of racial profiling were the vestiges of institutional racism and deeply entrenched social perceptions of African-American males as more likely than others to be criminal or to possess some criminal intent.
Meeks (2000) maintains that racial profiling of African-Americans first emerged in the wake of numerous reports of the practice on all scales and all kinds of situations ranging from the arrest of a 10 year-old Black boy riding his bicycle by police officers who assumed that the bike was stolen to the inability of actor Danny Glover to get a taxi in New York City.
More recently, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, racial profiling of individuals who either are or appear to be of Muslim or Middle Eastern heritage has become a social problem. Wertheimer (2001) has noted that by the end of September 2001, the terrorist attacks had increased scrutiny on more than 500,000 foreigners studying at U.S. colleges. The FBI, invoking a rarely used clause in a federal privacy act, asked some schools to turn over information on foreign students and a bill in the U.S. Congress would make it easier for government agencies to get the files of any such student.
Some lawmakers are even calling for the implementation of a 1996 law that was supposed to create a national electronic monitoring system of a...