Should police or figures with authority be allowed to profile individuals based on race? Can even a successful Broadway actor, be stereotyped as a member of the criminal population? Patricia J. Williams presents her view in "Road Rage," and Alton Fitzgerald White explains his case in "Ragtime, My Time." Racial profiling has completely changed Whites views on life due to a confounding experience with the police. White claims that racial profiling has shattered his belief in that hard work, being a good person, and always telling the truth, would gain respect. While Williams raises the awareness of racial profiling and warns of the consequences of the practice. Williams questions racial profiling when being a citizen is either safe on one side or mournfully sorry on the other?.
Alton Fitzgerald White and Patricia J. Williams have very much in common. Although White bases his case on personal experience and Williams bases her case on statistical evidence concerning the law, they both believe that racial profiling is wrongful practice. .
Both share a common ground when it comes to certain minorities being singled out by persons of authority. White explains when his belief had changed about the police because of racial profiling "my perception of everything I had learned as a young man was forever changed - not only because of the fact that I wasn't given even a second to use any of the wonderful manners and skills my parents had taught me as a child, but mostly because the police, who I"d always naively thought were supposed to serve and protect me, were actually hunting me." In Williams essay she explains that there is statistics indisputably showing that most drug - related offenses are white, but still "none of the three judges who arraigned felony cases in New York County could recall a single Port Authority drug interdiction case where the defendant was not black or Hispanic. (424) .