Editor,
I would like to bring a matter to your attention. Lost in the discussion of racial profiling is another potentially egregious form of harassment being perpetrated on a subset of our citizenry based on miniscule differences in physical appearance. Namely, those of us who choose to wear beards, goatees, mustaches, foo-man choos, lambchops and various other facial hair patterns may be at risk of being harassed by authority types threatened by perceived rebelliousness.
It is a form of discrimination I refer to as facial profiling.
I wear a beard and my experience this past Saturday brought this reality chillingly home. Upon entering a non-descript and not very entertaining nightclub with three cleanly shorn friends, I alone was asked to remove my identification from its plastic cocoon. After a lengthy inspection, I was told to tuck "that" in. As I was standing in 10-degree weather, I asked for clarification whether he expected me to tuck my coat into my pants.
Dutifully, he determined with the aid of his flashlight that I was indeed wearing an insulative outerwear in sub-freezing weather. Somewhat miffed, I nonetheless decided to attribute this banality to the doorman's lack of perspicacity - he was a doorman, after all. However, the remainder of my evening consisted of being ignored by bartenders, cajoled by security to tuck in my, as it turned out, very untuckable shirt and being the recipient of disapproving glares from the rent-a-cop.
While by no means as serious as racial profiling, facial profiling is nonetheless a blight on our society and needs to be eliminated.
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John Wagner
Daily Lobo reader
