Who would have thunk it? Obviously none of those expert profilers who speculated that the sniper in the Washington area was a cowardly white man of somewhere between 25 and 50 years of age who may or may not have had a military and/or law enforcement background.

He was driving a white minivan, we believed. And maybe he was a member of an al-Qaida cell! But who got caught and charged? Two black males, one in his 40s, the other still in his teens; one from Baton Rouge, La., the other from the Caribbean.

This should give us pause about how we make assumptions. As when census takers in the early 1900s listed my relatives as mulattos because they were of a slightly lighter hue than some neighbors, it comes down to what we choose to see or believe.

No one suggested that the sniper could be a black man. And he was surely not driving a 12-year-old blue Chevy Caprice.

A friend of mine said, only half kidding, “They didn’t think a black person could be smart enough” to pull off three weeks of terror, driving into very public places, hitting his mark, then eluding all the local, state and federal officers.

The surprise expressed by many in recent days that a former Army mechanic, John Allen Muhammad, was such a sharpshooter assuming Muhammad was the sniper calls to mind World War II, where some of the Army’s best marksmen, black men from units like Harlem’s Hellfighters, were not permitted to shoot. They cooked and drove trucks and bagged bodies. And harbored grudges.

That Muhammad drove an old blue car should make us wonder about the reliability of eyewitness testimony the type being discredited by DNA evidence that’s led to the release of scores of prisoners on Death Row or serving long sentences for crimes they did not commit.

In a curious way, blacks long excluded from the all-American ideal are now in the big leagues. A friend of mine who is Jewish indicated the same precarious tether to all-American when she said, “I’m glad his name wasn’t Schwartz!”

Crime and craziness are no respecters of race, ethnicity or religion.

The fact that so many news anchors and news readers and print reporters on this sniper story are black or Latino or Asian makes this feel less like an old-fashioned lynch mob a-gatherin’, what with all the yammering about whether Muhammad and his 17-year-old sidekick, Lee Boyd Malvo, should first be tried in Virginia, a death-penalty friendly state, or Maryland, which has executed only three people in the last couple of decades or even Alabama, where Montgomery’s police chief said he would “aggressively pursue the death penalty” for the two for a robbery-murder that took place there in September.

It doesn’t hurt that the lead man on the law-enforcement team was black, Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles Moose. We so-called minorities take pride in such accomplishments. They validate us. Like white people, we exemplify the American dream. Unlike white people, we are too often identified with the American nightmare.

In the future, it would behoove the professional profilers, as well as us amateurs, to keep that in mind.

E.R. Shipp’s e-mail address is eshipp2002hotmail.com.