As many of you know racial profiling has been going on for a while now but things just progressively get worse and worse. Discrimination has been an issue since the beginning of time whites always thought of blacks as weird and didn’t understand how people would be “colored” or black. Slavery was one big issue that happened a long time ago 1619 was when slavery started, during the time African Americans would be treated very badly they would be beaten or sold to others as a maid.
Families were torn apart they would have actions with the blacks tied up and naked even kids would be sold and were shipped somewhere far away in which they wouldn’t ever see their family again. If they were to stand up for themselves or do something wrong they would be tied up and beaten with a whip on their back which would give them terrible marks and bruises. What does this have to do with what were are dealing with now? What does racial profiling have to do with slavery? It deals with our issue now because people still seem to feel as if it´s okay to treat blacks with such disrespect and to feel as if they are not normal. The whites would torture blacks back in the days and now the whites still are able to torture blacks but not the way they did many years ago not with whips but with phones, which allow them to call the police whenever they feel as if they are ¨threatened¨ by black people. Why racial profiling has come back and has taken a turn for the worse?
Over the years raced based hate crimes have increased over the years which has to deal with police and them shooting innocent black males but police insist they had a right to shoot after they thought the person was holding a gun, threatening them or were grabbing something from their car or pocket. ¨According to the FBI race-based hate crimes increased ever since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016…Trump’s ugly rhetoric against black and brown people seems to have made some white citizens more comfortable acting on their racist impulse¨ ( Jones). Following on to race-based hate crimes ¨Statistics have shown that hate crime incidents reported to the FBI have increased by 17% last year compared to 2016… reports have also found that out of the 7,106 single-bias hate crimes reported, 59.6% of victims were targeted because of their ethnicity/race/ancestarty¨ (Schneider). Racial profiling is a very serious issue in which the people all around the world and governments have come out to say how it´s considered wrong in many ways, in which it is wrong for a white person to feel the need to call the police on an innocent black person trying to live a normal life.
There have been many reports in 2018 about a fatal shooting that had to deal with a cop and them shooting an innocent black person because they thought they had a weapon on them. According to Washington post, 937 people have been shot and killed by police in 2018 and as of last week, 19 more fatal shootings occurred. Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr story. ¨Emantic who was 21 was shot at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover Alabama on November 22. According to people that were there at the mall had heard gunshots and automatically contacted the police in which they were aware of the situation… Emantic was legally carrying a gun was direct shoppers to safety reports have said, but the police had mistaken him as the gunman and had shot and killed him while the real gunman was roaming of freely¨ (Victor). What leads them to assume that Emantic was the shooter? Well, it possibly might have been because he was black and had a gun, who knows what would have happened if a white person would have shot up the mall they still might have gotten the same reaction but with questions being asked.
How police react about the situation of racial profiling and what they feel on a daily bases of being accused of racial profiling. ¨A officer has come out to say that for his job they have to go to a field looking for Latino men that dress a specific way which includes having certain tattoos on their bodies and live in an area where gang members live. The officer claimed that by doing this it doesn’t seem to be racial profiling he thinks he’s simply just doing his job. Police feel as if their using specific description to find the person and that ethnicity is just one of the criteria¨ (Dutta). Police have also come out to tell their own definition about what racial profiling means to them and they said “Racial profiling has consistently been one of the most confounding, divisive and controversial issues the police department confronts. A perception that police target members of specific ethnic or racial groups create a deep divide between the police and the communities we serve. But as an officer who has spent a lot of time patrolling the city’s streets, I just don’t think the perception is accurate.” (Dutta) One police came out with his story and this is what he had to say “I was accused of racial profiling on the first traffic stop I made as a rookie LAPD officer in 1998. I had spotted a reckless driver speeding through the streets of Van Nuys in a large pickup truck, so I flipped on my lights and took up the chase.
The driver eventually pulled over, but as I walked up to his car, he began shouting at me, accusing me of having stopped him because he was black¨ (Dutta). The way the police continue to assume that whatever they do is not considered racial profiling at all and that it´s just for work is absolutely ridiculous. Police have come out with another statement saying “We have to acknowledge that there is a place for race and ethnicity in police work. Officers are trained to use all the data available to them in apprehending criminals. When officers follow leads and stop people, they do use profiling, but it is profiling based on all actionable intelligence, which includes race as one of many criteria. I suspect the officer whose comment was caught on tape was talking about this kind of criminal profiling.” (Dutta). A big topic that has been surfacing this year is white people having the need to call the police on innocent black people for absolutely no reason.
One main topic I had about this situation would be life as a black woman “As a Black feminist living at the intersection of race and gender, it pains me to see women, who experience oppression because of their gender, inflicts oppression upon Black people based on our race. On one hand,-1 know what it’s like to be judged based on my race, and on the other, I know how horrible it feels to be underestimated because I am a woman. But as I try to build coalitions with Black people and women, I find it difficult to work with White women who, in this new era, rely heavily on the ‘damsel in distress’ trope to get what they want or at least to punish Black people for daring to occupy the same space and breathe the same air¨ (Jones). This year a lot of incidents have occurred like the time when two black men went to Starbucks for a meeting one asked to used the bathroom but the manager didn’t allow him then she decided to call the police or the time when a black guy got the police called on him for moving into his new apartment.
Racist white women this goes back to racist white people having an issue on blacks mostly all the incident that occurs it always deals with a white woman having some sort of issue with black people. According to this article, the most racist towards blacks would be white women. White women, in particular, are known for calling the police on innocent blacks. White women appear to hesitate about black people and seem to have a problem with them living their lives freely. There was a story that came out on abcnew.go and it was about this nine-year-old kid named Jeremiah and he was with his mother at a small little shop when they were about to leave they passed this lady and the lady accused the nine-year-old of sexual harassing her but all he did was accidentally brush past her since it was too crowded. The woman then decided to call the police and got into an argument with the boy’s mother, police check the security cameras and come to find out the little boy never touched her the woman then apologized but the boy will forever be traumatized by the incident.
How can we stop kids from believing that treating others with a different color skin tone badly is okay? ¨According to Teaching Tolerance, which helps schools educate children about tolerance and diversity. Those environmental triggers can come from verbal slurs, ethnic jokes and acts of discrimination. And ‘mass media routinely take advantage of stereotypes as shorthand to paint a mood, scene or character.’ The Greater Good Science center has advised parents to expose kids to a more positive light of other racial groups, help kids develop diverse friendships, talking openly about race and the effects of racism, and cultivating your own diverse friendships¨ (Yan).
Works Cited
- Victor, Daniel. ¨Black Man Killed by Police in Alabama was shot from behind, Autopsy shows.¨ New York Times Magazine, 4 Dec. 2018. nytimes.com Lopez, German.
- ¨FBI: reported hate crimes increased by 17 percent in 2017.¨ Vox, 13 Nov. vox.com Francis, Enjoli and Bill Hutchinson. ¨I don’t forgive this woman, and she needs help’: Black child wrongly accused of grabbing ‘Cornerstore Caroline’.¨ ABC News, 16 Oct. 2018. abcnews.go.com
- Jones, Feminista. ¨Breathing While Black¨ Essence Communications,Inc. 1 Sep. 2018, pp.1. sks.sirs.com Semple, Philip.
- ¨Profiling and Racial Profiling: An Interactive Exercise¨ College Quarterly, v16 n4 Fall 2013. pp.13. EBSCOhost.com scrible.com
- Yan, Holly. ¨This is why everyday racial profiling is so dangerous.¨ CNN, 11 May. 2018 cnn.com
