Cornering the giant elephant in the room, hidden under the throw rug.
A phrase thrown around a lot in regards to race and racism is "post-racial society". Many people falsely believe that we live in a post-racial America, devoid and free from the oppressive ignorance associated with racism. Perhaps the biggest contribution to this belief is that United States President Barrack Obama comes from a bi-racial family, and since he is the leader of the United States racism is non-existent.
This is completely ignoring the struggles that everyday minorities go through on a daily basis; things that people who are not considered minorities can take for granted. In an AP poll taken about racial perspectives since 2008, 51 percent of Americans denoted anti-black attitudes since 2008, compared to 48 percent prior to 2008 (Ponds, 2013). Racism is not dead in America and actually thrives due to fear, misconception, and learned hatred conveyed by popular media trends that uphold outdated racial stereotypes.
Perhaps the biggest aspect of racism in America is the fear associated with race and racial differences. It is the catalyst to many of the stereotypes that persist in American culture, and play a huge factor in how American people interact with one another. The racism that was experienced by the Arab Americans since the attacks on September 11th, 2001 is deeply rooted in the fear that terrorism had a face that looked different than a white person’s.
Like many fears that are based on racial stereotypes, the fear that any Arab American could be a sleeper agent for a terrorist organization is without a basis in reality. The fear ignores that a majority of the Arab Americans in the United States today are natural born citizens, the sons and daughters of Americans whose ancestors arrived here anywhere from 1875 to the end of the Second World War (“Caught in the…”, 2014).
In addition to the fears associated with Arabs, the fear associated with African Americans has been firmly cemented and entrenched in American society for centuries. Slave masters refused to educates slaves to the point where any slave that could read or write was put to death. This fear of educated African Americans persisted long past the days of enslavement, and permeated into modern day culture. Even America’s bi-racial president who looks and identifies as an African American, and has received an education from Harvard Law School is subject to discrimination based on the color of his skin.
Every action committed by President Obama is placed under a microscope, and met with scrutiny. “The idea of having a black family in the White House was initially so sensitive to some that even simple acts like a fist bump or a pat on the behind between husband and wife, were analyzed for possible racial undertones” (Netter, 2010). The words sensitive and scary could be easily interchangeable depending on the audience the statement is being attributed towards. The mainstream media seems to be downplaying the effects of race in this country, despite the many incidents that lead to the contrary.
A prime example of the current culture of fear surrounding minorities can be seen in the treatment of immigrants of Latin descent. The stigma of illegal immigrants permeates to the surface of race relations even if the citizens in question are legal immigrants or naturally born into the country. Even the terms undocumented or illegal alien only serve to dehumanize and estrange White Americans from the subject of addressing the human element behind immigration. The racism and xenophobia hidden behind the guise of public safety and security issues only serves to further divide the people in control from those without any control. There is no rationale for the barring of immigrants coming into this country from Latin and even Middle Eastern countries other than fear-mongering on the part of legislators.
“There is a long tradition of raw fear fouling the immigration debate. Lou Dobbs ranted about superhighways from Mexico injecting Spanish speakers deep into the heartland. Gov. Jan Brewer told lies about headless bodies in the Arizona desert. And now Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, is warning of radical Islamists posing as Hispanics and infiltrating from the southern border” (“Immigration and Fear”, 2013). America has trumpeted itself for centuries as a melting pot of cultures culminating into a stew of humanity filled to the brim with vibrant cultures and customs from various walks of life. Yet it seems that the powers that be are more selective about what regions the ingredients hail from.
The biggest black eye on the issue of immigration reform is Arizona’s SB 1070, which requires police to check the immigration status of people who are stopped by law enforcement (Planas, 2014). While much of the leg work behind this discriminatory law can be attributed to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, “many Arizonans, particularly conservatives, applauded SB 1070, seeing it as a way to stem illegal immigration in the face of federal inaction” (Planas, 2014). There were reports that the law enforcement checks were disproportionately targeting illegal immigrants, which are often the ones scrutinized when illegal immigration is discussed. After the Supreme Court passed anti-immigration law SB 1070 in 2010, copycat bills have been introduced in two dozen state legislatures and passed in a total of 5 states: Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah (“Arizona's SB 1070”, 2014). The ACLU has been actively fighting all of the legislation in state appeals courts.
While immigration is huge issue that brings about a separate series of questions, it is clear the motivations behind the opinions and laws restricting immigration or targeting immigrants are based on the fear and misconceptions rooted in racism. The news coverage is disproportionately discussing the illegal immigration of non-citizens from the Mexican border and coverage on illegal Asian or European immigrants are non-existent. The numbers support that the immigration is a majority of people from Mexico and Latin America, topping out at roughly 81 percent of all undocumented immigrants while the rest of the world sneaks into America at about 19 percent (Passel, 2005). The lack of coverage concerning immigrants from other countries is seemingly based on numbers, but one has to wonder if the numbers were different would illegal immigration be met with such vitriol and dread.
The death of African American teen Trayvon Martin is a prime example of how one person’s irrational fear caused the death of another based on the misconceptions and stereotypes deeply rooted in American society. While this story is only a single example of the violence committed against young African American males, it is one that is becoming more commonplace in the state of Florida with the creation of the Stand your Ground law. This tragic story is laden with misconceptions that plague African Americans in society today. For example, George Zimmermann, the neighborhood watch captain of the Twin Lakes gated community, called 911 to report a “suspicious person” and was instructed to wait in his car until police arrived (“Trayvon martin shooting…”, 2014). If he managed to do so Martin would still be alive today, but the misconception of Martin as a dangerous and suspicious person in a gated community was based on the inaccurate and uninformed belief on the part of Zimmermann that Martin had no business being in the area. Martin was in the care of his father, who resided in the gated community at the time of his son’s murder.
Another misconception about the case was the outfit that Martin was wearing at the time. Several reporters in the media called attention to Martin wearing a hoodie at the time of the murder contributing to his death, or even being the cause of his death. Rivera was quoted on the program Fox and Friends stating “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was (Kung, 2012)” (Mays, Johnson, Coles, Gellene, & Cochran, 2013). This is stemming from the common misconception that dangerous people wear hoodies, or that perhaps Martin was perceived as more dangerous because he was black and wearing a hoodie.
This misconception also lends itself to how we dole out justice under the eyes of the law. The rates of incarceration among African Americans is nearly six times the incarceration rate of White Americans and over twice the rate of Latinos as of 2010 (“U.S. incarceration rates”, 2014). The common belief is because African Americans are more violent commit more crimes and this is why they are incarcerated at a disproportionate amount. This is based on stereotypes and misconceptions, as media trends prefer to shed light on minority criminals as opposed to those who chose to better themselves through education and community service. This perception of the African American criminal is not without some basis in reality; the disparity in incarceration rates is indeed real and there are reasons behind the numbers.
There is a system in place that starts young people on the road to prison very early dubbed the “School-to-Prison” pipeline in which “children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems” (“School-to-Prison”, 2014). With more and more schools enforcing zero-tolerance rules and policies that eject children from school for even the most minor of fractions, it also disproportionately targets low-income minority children among other types. “Once a child is subjected to suspensions or arrests in school, they are less likely to graduate and more likely to end up involved in the criminal justice system," says Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU's executive director. "That means they're on a path to prison, not graduation" (Knifel, 2013). This quiet customization to criminal processing is effectively jailing the African American youth, as they transfer from classroom to a prison cell or unemployment. It also reinforces the negative stereotypes that all African Americans are somehow connected to criminal activity or criminals themselves.
If by any chance this all still seems to be correlation without causation, there is a smoking gun that flat out states that black students are disproportionately the recipients of swiftly meted out punishments. “The number of students suspended from New York City schools each year has more than doubled under Bloomberg, from roughly 29,000 in 2001 to almost 70,000 in 2011. Half of those suspended were black, despite black students comprising less than a third of the student population. Black students with disabilities have the highest rates of suspension, almost three times higher than their white disabled peers” (Knifel, 2013). In Chicago, black students make up 40 percent of the population and make up 75 percent of the arrests (Knifel, 2013). In total, “35% of black children grades 7-12 have been suspended or expelled at some point in their school careers compared to 20% of Hispanics and 15% of whites” (“Criminal Justice Fact…”, 2014). This sets the ground work for career criminals and reoffenders that will be incarcerated inside the system for most of their lives. Black children are set up by the system to fail and rot in jail, and whether or not the stereotypes and misconceptions came before or after the statistics, it reasons to believe that they both fuel one another.
To take the winds out of the sails of so much media that would neglects to inform the misinformed, there are actually more African Americans with degrees than are incarcerated in America. Ivory Tolsten, a professor at Howard University, destroys the myth of the criminal black male, stating “There are 1.4 million black men in college right now, and there are about 840,000 black men in prison” (“Are There Really…”, 2013). Nearly double the amount of black men in jail is pursuing a degree in higher education. Unfortunately, there are people who will believe that a black man going to college is the exception instead of the rule thanks to aggressive media coverage of black criminals and a crusade to criminalize African Americans.
To the benefit of White people in America, they have laws that can protect them against prosecution even when they are morally wrong. Stand Your Ground, the legal protection that became extremely controversial after George Zimmermann trial in Florida, has been used in several shootings involving minorities since that incident. John Roman, a senior member of the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center “analyzed the pool of 43,500 homicides by race in states with Stand Your Ground laws and those without them.” (Childress, 2012). After sorting through the information, Roman found that “Whites who kill blacks in Stand Your Ground states are far more likely to be found justified in their killings. In non-Stand Your Ground states, whites are 250 percent more likely to be found justified in killing a black person than a white person who kills another white person; in Stand Your Ground states, that number jumps to 354 percent. (Childress, 2012).
Although it can only be invoked by the wealthiest of people, the Affleunza defense is a tactic used by a lawyer to give a teenage driver probation instead of jail time in the case of killing a family of 4 while the 16 year old lost control of his speeding truck under the influence of alcohol (Walker, 2013). The idea behind Affluenza is that wealth has stunted the ability of the individual to tell right from wrong due to the affluence generally caused by wealth. Outrage ensued by the parties involved at the prospect that death of four people would go relatively unpunished, and others have used similar defense claims for heinous crimes to get themselves out of jail free. It is a stark contrast from the pitfalls befalling minorities in America.
These feelings associated with the fear and misconception of a minority race can manifest into hatred simply because they belong to a particular ethnicity or identify with a racial group. In the 1960’s, the white people in support of equal rights for African Americans were referred to as “nigger lovers” and other derogatory terms. Perhaps the biggest betrayal against minorities is by those who are supposedly charged with serving and protecting the citizens of the United States. The police have a history of violence against African Americans for decades as well, and often enforced the racist laws of the land that barred and segregated African Americans from businesses, schools, and areas of the country.
With the passage of time, the overt violence is still committed against African Americans in addition to another method of discrimination and disproportionate harassment: racial profiling. The most notable and recent of this singling out of minorities is New York’s stop and frisk policy that stopped minority males and frisked them despite the fact they had committed no crimes prior to the unlawful search. “There were 2.8 million such stops between 2004 and 2009 alone. Over fifty percent of those stops were of Black people and thirty percent were of Latinos, while only ten percent were of whites” (Gerstmann, 2013). Profiling is simply a by-product of American psychology that unwittingly promotes discrimination, hatred, and segregation.
The events that inspire racial discrimination and hatred in this country are widely rejected and railed against by many. Yet it would seem that those in the majority still hold onto the misconceptions and stereotypes the media portrays to condemn minorities of all backgrounds based on the actions of a few. African Americans are still viewed as dangerous despite facts and evidence to the contrary, Arab Americans are still seen as potential terrorists by many despite having been in America for half a century, and Latino Americans will still have the misconception of illegal immigrants despite their history with America. It’s time to acknowledge that racism is the biggest elephant in the room in American culture. The issue is so deeply ingrained in our society that we willing and subconsciously draw lines on the ground between neighborhoods and place gates around our communities that separate those that are like us from those that are not.
The caricatures of pop culture become the rule instead of the exceptions. In our haste to judge others, we overlook the multitude of examples that have time and time again broken every conceivable argument sustaining the illogical thinking behind race superiority. College graduates are overshadowed and out-shined by both criminals and victims in our news coverage. We create a culture of violence based on how different we are from the normalized status quo. We reinforce these stereotypes supplied by the American media until fabrication becomes reality. Racism is not dead in America and actually thrives due to fear, misconception, and learned hatred conveyed by popular media trends that uphold outdated racial stereotypes. As long as our misconceptions and prejudices against each other are allowed to persist and thrive, we will not be able to rise above the majority and minority hierarchy or become a truly post-racial society.
References
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