Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Last week I went to visit a friend who had just moved to a small town in upper state New York. The town, Malta, is 40 minutes drive from the state's capital Albany. Like any such small town in that area, most of the time the streets are empty and quiet and you can't count on bumping into anyone.

But it was a different story when we went swimming in a pool located in a local park. On this scorching summer afternoon, it seemed like half of the population in the area had come here to splash around and cool off. Looking at these people, it didn't take me long to draw the conclusion that this district is in the pocket of Donald Trump, the gaffe-inclined Republican presidential nominee.

I didn't survey the swimmers. There was no scientific poll. But I was pretty certain I was right because I saw many more of the kind of men you can often see at Trump rallies: tough-looking white men with flat-top haircuts, tattoos and, in many cases, some excessive fat on their frames. You don't see this in most pools in New York City.

And my friends, a Chinese woman and a liberal white man, both agreed with me. But this consensus soon made me a little disturbed. Neither I nor my friends would normally look at things through the tinted view of racial profiling and stereotypes. In fact, we have discussed and agreed many times before how unfair it is to judge people by their looks.

In addition, I know better. I have met Trump supporters who don't look like that at all. Among them were a street vendor who said Trump is like a red pepper covered dish of Sichuan food, which may look intimidating but tastes good, and a real estate agent who said he liked Trump's personality. Both were Chinese.

But how did we so hastily label people as Trump supporters based purely on their looks? And does this just go to prove Trump's argument that the liberal media can't tell it straight and is campaigning against him?

Can I blame the surveys?

In all election years, pollsters like to analyze supporters of different candidates. Even more so in an election year when voters are as bifurcated as this one. And this year, painting an image of Trump supporters seems to be a particular media focus - much more so than anything similar for Hillary Clinton.

Mind you, experts still don't completely agree with one another on who the Trump supporters are. Previous surveys zoned in on less educated low-income and blue-collar white men who suffer from financial woes and limited job opportunities.

But a new study from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews over the past year and released last Friday, found that although Trump supporters are more likely to be blue collar workers, their incomes are not necessarily lower than average. Rather, the study points out that isolated areas that have little racial diversity have an uncanny correlation with Trump supporters.

Could it be because I knew this town has a population that is more than 90 percent white, and 35 percent blue collar, that I unconsciously categorized it as a Trump town before consciously looking for the most common physical characteristics to visualize my own pre-formed beliefs?

Or should I blame Trump himself? After all, he was the one who kicked off the ugly game of judging people only by their looks. When he was insulting Muslims, women and Mexicans, Trump may not have realized that racial profiling is contagious and it can quickly backfire on those who do it.

Whatever the exterior factors that led me to that unreasonable conclusion are, I decided I should blame myself first for allowing myself to be infected. But that won't change a sad realization that Trump's campaign may have ignited a new type of racial profiling. Or shall we call it "reverse racial profiling"? Its victims are no longer only people of color, but also white construction workers, farmers, truck drivers and those who do laborious work.

For those who don't support Trump, being labeled this way may cause some anger or even trauma. For those who proudly support him, being considered as having a Trump supporter's face may be a perfect reminder that they are not that different from the people their candidate insulted.

The author is a New York-based journalist. [email protected]