Profiles of discrimination: a critical argument against racial profiling

Racial profiling has become a common, but still largely ignored practice in Europe. This paper intends to put forward an argument against its legitimacy. In order to do this, the paper first tackles the problem of the definition of racial profiling. Then, by resorting to some of the main tenets of Critical Race Theory, it criticizes two of the most influential justifications of racial profiling. By adapting the idea that law is part and parcel of the process which creates racial categories, a critical argument for explicitly forbidding racial profiling is put forward. The last section deals with the question of legal remedies and it points to some of the difficulties that laws against racial profiling might have to face