DeWitt Clinton ‘97 explains why drunken Ephs are like terrorists.

The biggest problem with “-isms”, such as racism, is the hurt it causes, both to the target and to overall health of a society. But the other problem is how stupidly innacurate it is. This really clicked for me in a synergistic way one Saturday night, years ago, as some friends and I walked around our small college campus past the fraternity-esque row houses and the groups of screaming, stumbling, and rowdy party goers. My impression had been that Williams was just a school full of big drunk idiots, and that my friends and I were a small minority of outsiders amid a school of unruly frat boys. But as we walked on back to the quad I noticed that the lights in most dorm rooms were still on, that there were groups of people sitting and chatting on their stairs, that the computer and science labs all had late-night occupants, and that everywhere around campus, alone or with friends, there were people going about their lives in quiet, unobtrusive ways. So in reality the drunk idiots were in the small minority, though you would never know it by a superficial glance. And that is always the case — the smallest minority, if they are loud and obnoxious enough, will always tend to dominate the perception of the whole, even if you are inside the group in question.

Perhaps this comment applies to postings on EphBlog as well. Hmmmm.

Like everything that Clinton writes, the entire post is worth a read (which you need to do to get the terrorist analogy). However, I don’t buy this:

A week or two ago I was following a heated email thread that all started when someone forwarded a racist quiz that asked you to identify the ethnicity of the terrorist in various incidents over the past several decades. The “point” was that all of them were young Muslim men. Of course, the quiz left out all of the rather numerous counterexamples.

So? I guess that I should, theoretically, be concerned that the IRA might plant a nuclear bomb in Boston. There is a possibility that Unabomber Version 2.0 might send my wife a nasty package. But can any realistic version of the likely probabilities deny that, should my loved ones perish in a terrorist attack, the murderers would most likely be young Muslim men?

This fact tells us nothing about what US policy should be, of course. It tells me nothing about how I should act around young Muslim men. (Hi Esa!) But denying reality does not seem like a propitious place to start when trying to decide how to act going forward.