Randomly Selected?

         I came across a picture yesterday posted. Well, not really a picture. It was actually a screen-shot of a Snapchat. The world of Snapchat is one for a later discussion, but what I wanted to look at now was the content of this screen-shot Snap.

  The photo, shown here, is of a man with a turban. The man is relatively young, and is going through airport security. Although the photographer, the man pictured himself, seems to make light of an actually serious issue. The face of the man resembles a funny/shocked look common in many "selfies" (photographs of yourself, taken by yourself). The caption, which is typed across the screen and complete with a few emojis of a man in a turban, reads, "' Bout to get randomly selected." The word randomly is the one that has the most emphasis to me. I think if snapchat allowed more characters in the text line he would have put the word "randomly" in parentheses. As he is making a comment about racial profiling, and how the "random" searches, are actually not so random. 

This is a controversial topic. Whether or not the people who select who to use for these searches, uses racial profiling. And to what extent it is acceptable to use this racial profiling. From what I understand, the officers feel it necessary to profile people, to a slight extent, because there are so many people and not enough time to check them all. For example if they are looking for someone to search airport security they will choose a twenty something man with a turban over an eighty something white woman. It's hard for me, though, to see how this slight need to profile wouldn't be abused. If the only people the TSA scans are young middle eastern men, then they will miss real potential terrorists because the ones who aren't being searched will learn that they are not watched as closely. While I'm not suggesting that my grandma will be trying to sneak bombs through the airport, I think it is worth thinking about the extent that racial profiling is used, and whether or not it should be used at all.