Speech about Racial Profiling

The professional speaker that I went to see was Natalie Stoljar. She is a philosophy professor at McGill University. She gave her speech in Farber Hall. The topic that she was talking about was racial profiling and whether or not it was discriminatory. She did not go into all of the aspects of racial profiling she just went into how it plays into the police system. She looked at racial profiling in the philosophical way. I think that the purpose of the speech was to persuade us whether or not racial profiling is discriminatory, and she did a good job of it.

She had a lot of arguments that made her point even stronger and had a couple of counter arguments that she explained why they were wrong. This criticism will discuss what her speech was about and how she delivered her speech.

Before she even started talking about racial profiling, she gave a definition of what race was and gave two assumptions about race and crime. The first assumption that was given was that certain groups of people will do certain crimes. The second assumption that she said was that certain groups of people will be treated differently at traffic stops. She mentioned that she was going to talk about racial profiling in a philosophical way. After she gave the assumptions, she gave her policy statement which was, is racial profiling morally objectionable, even if assumptions a and b are established? She mentioned that she was only going to look at racial profiling from the policing and reducing crime side. Her first main point is a counter argument that says that by racial profiling it produces results and that the benefits outweigh the profiling. Her argument against this was that there are other ways to produce the results and that racial profiling is wrong. She also argues that it can cause psychological problems. The support type that she uses is a testimony from someone who had experienced racial profiling. She then transitions into her second point which is about respect. She said that in order to understand why it is disrespectful then we needed to know what respect was. She talked about the different levels of disrespect and briefly talked about them. The third main point in her speech was about generic generalizations. She explains how people tend to transfer these generic generalizations into the social realm. Some of the generic generalizations that she said was that tigers eat people. The generic generalization that she uses for the social realm is that all Muslims are terrorists. She explains that people tend to make these generalizations and it puts a stereotype on certain groups of people. She summed up her speech by saying her points again and saying that racial profiling is morally objectionable.

Overall, I thought that her delivery of her speech was great. She used a PowerPoint as a visual aid so that we could follow along. She used a podium and a very good eye contact and kept her voice level. She also gave her speech behind a podium. I liked this because sometimes when people give speeches and they are pacing then it is hard to pay attention to them. She gave her speech in Farber Hall and the lighting in there was good it was not too dark or too bright. It was a good mix. Professor Stoljar also had many sources that she used in her speech and used one source multiple times because it applied to a lot of the things that she talked about. She followed a good format when she gave her speech. It was easy to follow and keep up. I think that it helped that she had a PowerPoint because sometimes she would jump between two points or go back to something that she had said earlier and say it again. At the end of her speech she had a question and answer time so if someone did not understand something then she could go into further detail and explain it. In conclusion, I really liked the speech it was very informational and well put together and delivered. Some of the things that I learned from this speech as that when police make traffic stops, they tend to treat people different ways based on who the person is, or group of people were. Some advice that I would give Professor Stoljar is when giving the speech try to go into a little more detail with certain subjects because some of the speech it was hard to follow because I did not understand some of the ideas that she was saying. Overall, it was a good speech and I learned a lot and was glad that I got to go to this speech.

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