Forced to ride Jim Crow is the key. Not identity as sense of self, but identification by others, peremptory and binding, figuring even in well-meant efforts to undo the crimes of racism. The victim’s intangible race, rather than the perpetrator’s tangible racism, becomes the center of attention. Thus, racist profiling goes by the misnomer “racial profiling,” and the usual remedy proposed for it is to collect information about—what else?—the victims’ “race.”
