Media Arguments Against Racial Profiling

Racial discrimination has been around for way longer than what we can think of. At the beginning of 1909, The NAACP was founded and organized by a small activist group who waged a long struggle to eliminate racial discrimination and segregation from the American life. 108 years later racial profiling is still a huge problem. Many people try to ignore the situation, however, death rate has increased 29 percent in the last 50 years due to racial profiling. Racial discrimination is a goes a long from false arrest, media instigation, to getting involved with a crime based off your skin color. Racial profiling is when a race is used in deciding who to investigate. It’s the discriminatory practice by the law enforcement of targeting individuals

People often post videos on social media of fights, or people getting caught stealing and majority of the time it’s a group of black people in the middle of the situation. A lot of the times if you read the comments names are called such as monkeys, animals, the “n” word, and so much more; yet if its white people “trash” is the word that is used more than anything. Kassia E. Kulaszewicz of St. Catherine University of St. Thomas states, “African Americans struggled to represent their own stories, beliefs, opinions and identities because White people controlled the entertainment industry and choose what images of Black people to portray”. When something is posted on the internet the full story is never broadcasted, only the part that was wrong or the outcome of the situation is posted. Lately, a lot of videos of cops shooting and killing “innocent” blacks has been going viral, however, it never shows what happened before the cops came or what that person did or said before their life was taken from

People may think this helps the police when it comes down to solving a crime, yet it fenders them tremendously. Majority of the time a race is singled out depending on the crime that was committed, while the police are looking for a specific race this gives the suspect time to get away, or even blend in with the crowd and act as if they are victims or bystanders. Clegg mentions “Some would argue that racial profiling is perfectly rational and ought therefore to be unobjectionable. The argument is that a disproportionate amount of street crime is committed by people who are young, and male, and black, and if you are all three then it makes perfect sense for the police to keep an especially keen eye on you, and pull you over more often, question you more carefully, and press you more aggressively to allow a search of your car. That is, it makes perfect sense if all the police are trying to do is maximize in the short term the number of their successful searches and arrests.” For example, if a shooting breaks out everyone will automatically think it is somebody of the arabic descendent not someone who’s white or black. In 1995, the oklahoma city federal building was bombed, killing 168 people, and leaving many more injured. The suspects were 2 white people, however, they were able to flee the scene because the cops were looking for an “arab terrorist.” It’s moments like that when