Many middle-aged white women in America have become increasingly addicted to OxyContin and other pain medications in the last decade. It hasn’t only spiked the number of overdoses in white women of a certain age, but it could possibly lead them to being accident-prone drivers or perhaps stealing to support their habit. And if they have trouble doctor-shopping, maybe they are buying street drugs which leads to a black market and violence.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker is a white woman in that age group. She should be profiled not only by police who hope to reduce illicit drug purchases but also by armed civilians in cars who pursue her while she’s on foot. She is naturally a suspect because of how she looks. Perhaps those are just Skittles in her bag, but who knows? Maybe she’s wandering around your neighborhood looking for her dealer. According to Kathleen Parker’s reasoning, it’s just common sense that she be stopped and frisked, that other citizens must stand their ground. 

From her latest column:

“The point is that this is one of those rare instances in which everyone is right within his or her own experience. African Americans are right to perceive that Martin was followed because he was black, but it is wrong to presume that recognizing a racial characteristic is necessarily racist. It has been established that several burglaries in Zimmerman’s neighborhood primarily involved young black males.

Picture Zimmerman’s neighbor Olivia Bertalan, a defense witness, hiding in her locked bedroom with her infant and a pair of rusty scissors while two young males, later identified as African American, burglarized her home. They ran when police arrived.

This is not to justify what subsequently transpired between Zimmerman and Martin but to cast a dispassionate eye on reality. And no, just because a few black youths caused trouble doesn’t mean all black youths should be viewed suspiciously. This is so obvious a truth that it shouldn’t need saying and yet, if we are honest, we know that human nature includes the accumulation of evolved biases based on experience and survival. In the courtroom, it’s called profiling. In the real world, it’s called common sense.”