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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2002
Column: Voices from the Inside Out by Robert
Taliaferro
Bias of national I.D. cards Who are you? Do you consider
yourself as Black, African American, Hispanic, Costa Rican? Have you ever
received a ticket, been arrested, been in prison? Has anyone in your family been
arrested? Do you have a drinking problem—or problems with drugs? Have you ever
been treated for depression, or does anyone in your family have psychological or
other medical problems? Most times we are asked
questions like this in an innocuous fashion on job applications, medical and
insurance queries, or through the normal conduct of our lives. After September 11, however,
those questions have taken on an entirely new context in a rather old debate. In
fact if the conservative Right has their way, those questions could be answered
by an electronic scan of a data chip on a national identity card, thus removing
the last vestige of privacy that Americans still have. OLD DEBATE MADE NEW The debate on national identity
cards is not new in this country—or in others. It is a question that, for the
most part, has been rejected because of the inherent abuses that it might cause
regarding civil liberties. Many supporters of a national
identity card argue that we already have the basis in many of the cards and
forms of identification that we currently carry. Social Security cards, drivers
licenses, Medicare and other insurance cards, even an application for a common
library card disseminates information to a variety of databases in the public
and private sectors. In fact, the private sector manages an alarming amount of
information on practically every person in the country, something that the
federal and state governments tap into in order to get around legislated privacy
laws. As a result, many supporters of
the national identity card question arguments that are designed to derail the
concept, relying on fueling the paranoia present in the country after September
11, by end-running the civil libertarians. The national ID card has some
powerful lobbyists. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has offered to donate the
database software that would logistically support the national ID system, and
Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard, noted that national IDs would
reduce the need for racial and ethnic stereotyping. Ellison, of course, is looking
towards the financial windfall that would benefit his company if it were chosen
as the "donating entity" for software. Though the software would be
donated, the advertising and management of such extensive software would require
many years of government contracts with his company. We live in a country where
racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious stereotyping is at the very core of its
existence, despite the "constitutional imperatives" that are in place.
This is a simple fact of life in the U.S. and it is time that we dealt with this
in the open, rather than hidden in the closet like some embarrassing family
secret. We live in a country where
abuses of whole cultures is a part of the national psyche, and where paranoia
often ignites the ever-present embers of ignorance that underlines American
idealism, especially in light of some "national" tragedy. U.S.'S HISTORY OF ABUSES Sixty years ago that paranoia
and bigotry embraced the loss of liberty and property for Japanese-Americans in
World War II, setting a tone of Asia-bashing that resulted in more wars in the
hemisphere. Sixty years later the same
paranoia embraces similar attacks on civil liberties with
Arab-speaking-appearing-thinking-supporting peoples, using tactics that have
been tried and tested on American Blacks, Indians, Asians, and Hispanics. It is about time that we stop
mixing apples with oranges and simply call certain practices what they really
are. With national ID's, the argument is not merely about privacy.
The argument should be about how easily such a card can further
discrimination, in all its forms: age, race, culture, gender, health, religious,
sexual, or a combination of all of the above. National ID's are used by
governments as a culling out process subject to historically documented abuses
with ethnocentrism as the guiding doctrine.
Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, especially in times
of war. Who are you? Is it anyone's business, but your own?! |
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