Randall Kennedy

It's not animus.

It's not invidious.

It's just, you know, the facts take us this way.

Well, the facts never take us this way.

There are facts, and then there is our choice of how we want to respond to those facts.

Now, you could respond by saying, well...

We perceive Muslims to be more likely to do bad things on an airliner.

You could respond in that way.

On the other hand, you could say, no, we want a society in which people do not have to grapple with prejudice on the basis of their religion or on the basis of their race.

And to deal with that, we are going to demand that agents of the state act towards people in the same way.

And so if that means that everybody getting on the airplane, before they get on the airplane, has to open up their luggage and it slows things down, but everybody has to open up their luggage, I would prefer that.

over a system in which we focus on people who are Muslim.

And one of the reasons, and I'm gonna bring this back to the racial thing, one of the reasons why I wanna insist upon that is because if we all have to open up our luggage

What that means is we're all paying a tax for more security.

And we're all likely to ask ourselves, hmm, do we want to pay this tax?

Whereas if we focus simply on the Muslims and allow the Muslims to be the only ones who are sort of paying the tax, we'll foist that on them.

Same in the black person, white person, 25 years old walking down the street.

Do we want to impose a racial tax on the black 25-year-old?

Some people would say yes.

I say that's a mistake.