Jason Homer
WW10B
Instructor: Jason Homer
Assignment 0
1/9/07
Heather Nickel, in the article “Driving While Black,” makes the claim that the police practice of
pulling over motorists and subjecting them to searches based primarily or solely on the driver’s race or
ethnicity, a practice which she calls “racial profiling,” is creating a debate in American society. According to
Nickel’s argument, this debate is largely between those who think racial profiling is a problem and would like
to see it stopped and those who find the solutions that are offered problematic themselves.
To ground this claim, the first half of Nickel’s article focuses on various laws being proposed and
lawsuits being filed to study or stop racial profiling (1-2). In several states, such as Illinois and California,
lawmakers have suggested that police departments collect data on the reasons drivers are pulled over (1).
Additionally, both the ACLU (an organization that protects American’s constitutional rights) and police officers
from Mount Prospect, Illinois have filed lawsuits to put an end to racial profiling (2). Nickel also cites
statistics in two sections of her argument that seem to point out evidence that minority drivers are more likely
to be pulled over (3) and less likely to be employed by police departments (2), which offers one possible
reason why racial profiling is occurring.
The second half of Nickel’s essay, however, looks at some of the problems that would happen if
these laws and lawsuits were effective. Nickel quotes other lawmakers and the spokesman for an Illinois law-
enforcement group who are opposed to some of the “solutions” being discussed (2-3) because, they say,
these solutions would make common police work much more difficult. Police officers, for example, would
create a “mental quota system” for white drivers (2) or be in the position of being falsely accused of racism
(2-3). Nickel only briefly discusses the claim that racial profiling perhaps doesn’t exist at all, in the section of
her essay in which she looks at the “socio-economic status” of minority drivers as the reason for them being
stopped in traffic (3).
Because of the type of grounding Nickel chooses to discuss, it is possible to see that most of the
evidence from her essay points not to the question of whether “racial profiling” exists, or even whether or not
it is a problem. By beginning and ending her essay with the example of Byron Harrison, a minority driver
presented as “the best hope for America’s future” (1), and by focusing the discussion on how the critics of
racial profiling frame the argument, Nickel advocates studying the issue further (3) with, one could assume,
the goal of ending racial profiling altogether.