You must be this white to ride the subways

Remember that that guy that the London police shot in the subway? He was not actually a terrorist. The London police shot a guy..I know that doesn't sound like a very big deal to Americans, but cops in England don't normally carry guns and don't normally shoot at people. According to the article, the London police have opened fire only twenty times since 1997.

So it was the wrong guy, but in order for the London police to take such drastic measures, he must have been acting pretty suspiciously, right? Only if you believe that wearing a heavy coat, looking like a South Asian, and being in a hurry are suspicious.

I didn't even want to make a big deal about how the guy was actually a Brazilian national. When it came out that this guy was a Brazilian national (and a Catholic!) people started getting pissed off that the police can't even racially profile people properly. What if Jean Charles de Menezes were a Saudi Arabian? Do Saudi Arabians deserve to get shot on the subway for no reason?
It doesn't matter if you are white, if you hail from a "non terrorist" country, because everybody looks suspicious these days. Wearing a big jacket is suspicious. Carrying a backpack is suspicious. Being a twenty-something male is suspicious. Things are going to be worse for Middle Easterners--they always are--but being white doesn't mean that this isn't going to affect you.

It will at least affect New Yorkers. New York City is now going to be searching its subway passengers. They're going to have cops pulling people out for random searches. The Cunning Realist explained why this is a stupid idea, though it isn't like I need very much convincing that random searches are dumb: I don't know what it is about me, but whenever I've had to go through some kind of security checkpoint, I'm always searched. Randomization my ass.