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Amadou Diallo and Wen Ho Lee: Racial
Profiling Across the Racial Borders
by Cherry
Lou Sy, staff writer
The
NYU’s Asian-American Women’s Alliance hosted “Amadou Diallo &
Dr. Wen Ho Lee: A Cross-Cultural Discussion on Hate Crimes and
Racial Profiling,” a discussion panel that focused on racial profiling
and hate crimes last week on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 at the
1st floor of the New York University Students Events Center in
Washington Place in the Village, where the NYU campus is located.
The panel consisted of four speakers—Alex Vitale, Christine Harrington,
Chisun Lee and Peter Kwong, respectively. The first speaker, Mr.
Vitale, focused on a systematic drug battle that, overtime, systematically
profiled the perpetrators of drug crimes. The targeted high-risk
offenders belong to certain ethnic groups, particularly minorities
belonging to the black and Latino communities. Because of this
wage on the drug war, a war that traces its roots to the Nixon
years, with a conspiracy mobilizing politics and the military,
targeting radical students and Afro-
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The Skinny on the Case...
by Suzette
Lam, staff writer
The
case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee has brought national attention to the case
of discrimination among Asian Americans. However, here at NYU,
many students are still unaware of the details of the case. Here's
a quick synopsis: Dr Wen Ho Lee was a nuclear physicist at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In March 1999, Dr.
Lee was charged with 59 counts of felony in mishandling confidential
nuclear information by the Justice Department. Dr. Lee was suspected
of being a spy for China.
[more]
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as the enemies of the state, racial profiling has been a method
employed in four areas: 1) airports (specifically in Customs, where
black women are the main targets of strip searches), 2) highways,
3) urban policing, and 4) counter espionage. He cites the Amadou
Diallo case that began on February 2000 when the victim “fit” the
physical description of the profiled rapist still at large in a
well-lit area in the Bronx was shot 41 times within seconds because
the police involved thought he was pulling out a gun from his pocket
when, in fact, the victim was merely pulling out his wallet thinking
that the plain-clothes policemen were robbing him when they pulled
out their hidden guns. Diallo could not understand English since
he was a recent immigrant from West Africa. The cops, thinking that
he was pulling a fast one, warned him to “freeze” and when the victim
did not comply, started shooting. |
