Aversive Racism

The killing of a young African American Michael Brown by white police officer Daren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014 shed a light on something that had long been ignored by the white population of the USA, the obvious inequality between black and white individuals in the criminal justice system. This racial bias is no longer based on explicit racism which was outlawed by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, instead it is influenced by implicit racial bias present in all aspects of the criminal justice system resulting in implicit assumptions that lead to quick and prejudice judgments based on negative stereotypes by the actors of the criminal justice system especially law enforcements which lead the uneven usage of “stop and

In the peer review Gaertner and Dovidio’s theory of aversive racism is presented. Aversive racism is another word for the racism fueled by prejudice of members of another race. According to this theory, the problem with is that aversive racism is seen more in liberal and educated people that usually don’t see their actions as racist, just natural. This allows racism to go unnoticed thus making it hard to combat. Aversive racism is triggered by situations where an individual has less time to react thus is unable to truly process the situation. In the law review, the idea of implicit racism is further explained with the explanation of them being “implicit associations,” categories that the brain assign to things to make sense of them in a fast almost automatic way. Law enforcements were shown to be victims of these implicit associations by looking at the unequal use of “stop and frisk” by NYPD officers. “Stop and frisk” is the ability of police officers to stop and quickly search and person without a warrant as long as they have “reasonable suspicion.” What has been found is that this suspicion is easily influenced by the implicit racial bias of police officers that leads them to view African Americans as suspicious. Data from the over use

One of them even had a research in it of a mock trial that showed the bias of white jurors against black defendants. What ever one sources lacked the other had plenty of. For example the policy report missed things that had to do with the Supreme Court like the “stop and frisk” decision of Terry v. Ohio, this is talked about in the law review though with several pieces of data about the usage of it by the NYPD. The law review lacked more modern information focusing more on different Supreme Court cases, the other two sources in the other hand looked at what things are like now. The peer review lacked information on things like unequal prison rates instead focusing a lot on the death penalty, still the fact that it had a legit experiment helped prove my point a lot. In the end, what needs to be gotten from this is not how good the sources are, but how we need to start finding a way to fix this. The first