To the editor:

Brushing aside the complaints of some Kansas Highway Patrol troopers that a recent study of alleged racial profiling by the officers was flawed and unfair, Herman Jones, the patrol’s director of administration, roundly declares, “If someone has a perception that you’re doing wrong, you’re doing wrong” (Journal-World, May 17).

By this reasoning, of course, proponents of the Copernican and American revolutions, the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage and school integration were all doing wrong. And the Golden Rule, Kant’s categorical imperative, George Eliot’s visionary utilitarianism and Sartrean existentialism have all been rendered obsolete as guides to human behavior.

But I doubt that Mr. Jones intended an epistemological and ethical revolution of quite this magnitude. In fact, I suspect that Jones is not really talking about truth or morality at all, but about political expediency. My translation of his pronouncement: If you’re a public official and intend to remain one, you genuflect systematically and ostentatiously at the altar of political correctness. One of the central pieties of this, our state religion, holds that the claims of historically oppressed groups are not open to question. Another holds that racism is so ubiquitous in our society that allegations of racist behavior do not require actual proof.

Jones appears to have understood that “studies” of race relations are in most cases not quests for truth or knowledge but ritual affirmations of established dogma.

Preston Fambrough,

Baldwin