Mid Term Paper

Taylor Martinez

Dr. Preston

Expository Reading And Writing

11-12-13

 

 

Racial Profiling Goes On

Racial profiling is a popular method used by law officers in order to hypothetically enhance crime prevention by targeting minorities, because they are more likely to commit a crime.  Racial profiling according to Wikipedia, is the use of an individual's race by law enforcement personal as a key factor in whether to engage a person or not.  Personally I can't think of an easier way to stop crime by using racial profiling.  I know in some cases it's bad practice to use because if you use this method of preventing crime on mostly Mexicans and or Blacks, you're more likely to assume that they might commit a crime.  If you stop them more than you stop Whites or Asians, then you're going to assume the Mexican did the crime before you assume the white guy did it.  Who knows?  Maybe the white guy did do it and the Mexican is just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Personally I think that Racial Profiling is misused a lot.  People just assume instead of trying to find that facts out first. 

            I personally have never experienced racial profiling (at least that I can remember of).  I'm not going to lie and say that I have never been racist and or used racial profiling before, but I can understand the method that law enforcement officers use.  Mainly because you don't see a lot of white people in gangs, living in the projects or bad neighborhoods.  You mostly see Mexicans or Blacks in the bad neighborhoods or in gangs (in Santa Maria at least).  It's too bad that they're automatically accused of committing a crime or being gang affiliated.  I just read this article about a Black teen buying a pricy bracelet from a store called Barney's and it said that this teen  was arrested and handcuffed after he/she left the store.  See, I don't know what exactly happened after the teen left the store, but the fact that he/she was arrested for buying a pricy bracelet is kind of ridiculous.  Just because he/she is a teenager, doesn't mean that they didn't save up the money or worked for that money to buy that item.  I know the average teenager won't save up money for an expensive bracelet because they would rather buy other stuff, but maybe they are more interested in buying  jewelry than they are buying a video games or other things.  But assuming that that teenager can't afford that item because he/she is a teenager is ridiculous.  Who cares what race or age they are, if they the money for it and they want to buy it, let them have it!  You have it in the store for a reason, because you're trying to make money by selling it. 

            It got me thinking to wonder how racist America is compared to other countries like the United Kingdom, China, Japan, Germany, Iran, The Netherlands, Canada, etc.  I did some research and found out that the top 10 most racist countries (including hatred against religion, minority, skin color, etc.) are #10 India #9 Pakistan #8 Russia #7 Israel #6 Germany #5 Japan #4 Rwanda #3 Australia #2 United Kingdom and #1 United States of America.  What I found out was that Africans have it the worst when it comes to racism.  I'm kind of surprised that some of the top 10 countries are in the top 10.  It's a shame that America has to be number 1 country in the world in racism.  I found out that racism in America is the most common in the South.  Mainly because of the times when Slavery was a big deal back then.  I guess because of all the hatred that was built up between the Whites and Blacks, still to this day people treat each other poorly because of it.  I think that I just won't understand what a white person from the South feels like when they see an African American in the town/city that they live in just because I wasn't raised up in the South or by a white family that used to own slaves back then.  It's ridiculous that the mindset of the Americans that live in the South hasn't changed.  I mean they should know that they're not going to get their family's slave farm back.  So why do they still need to treat them like crap?  Or say mean or derogatory things about them?

            In class we talked about hate speech, saying racist things and the 1st Amendment.  We also talked about how hate speech is said.  It's not always said so direct.  Some people try to say it in a more clever way so you  don't realize its racism until the end of the confrontation or if you really listen to how they say it.  It doesn't matter how you talk about someone in a racist way, it's still racism no matter what.  According to Wikipedia, hate speech is, outside the law, communication that vilifies a person or a group based on discrimination against that person or group. I think that it's sad when someone says they don't belong in this country just because of their skin color, religion or ethnicity.  Yes their ancestors aren't originally from here, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be here. I think that it's stupid how Whites think that they are originally from America.  If you think about it, if think far enough back, we are just as foreign as Africans, Asians and Europeans.  Sure Whites have been here longer than the other races, but that doesn't mean that we belong here in America and Africans, Asians, and Europeans don't. 

 

Bibliography

Negi, Dimple.  "Top 10 Most Racist Countries in the World".  List Dose.com  Web date:  June 27, 2013.

Nockleby, John T. (2000), “Hate Speech,” in Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, ed. Leonard W. Levy and Kenneth L. Karst, vol. 3. (2nd ed.), Detroit: Macmillan Reference US, pp. 1277-1279. Cited in "Library 2.0 and the Problem of Hate Speech," by Margaret Brown-Sica and Jeffrey Beall.

Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park, and Charles M. Judd Bernd Wittenbrink, "The Definition of Racial Profiling".  The Police Officer's Dilemma: Target Ethnicity and the Decision to Shoot, University of Colorado at Boulder/University of Chicago, http://psych.colorado.edu/~jcorrell/SPSP2002.pdf  Web date: November 23, 2005.