Racial Bias

I was watching the news, when the footage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster came on. The news reporters were showing a black man walking in flooded waters near a market with a bag full of food and labeled him a “thief”. Social media in the United States has portrayed people of different racial backgrounds differently and unequally in recent years. In the essays “Theories and Constructs of Race” and “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?” the authors discuss in both essays about issues with racial equality in our world today. Authors Linda Holtzman and Leon Sharpe discuss in the first essay racial schemes are created through prejudices and the telling and retelling of stories. While, authors Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado discuss in their essay about the issue of “colorblindness” in social media. Holtzman is a professor of communications and journalism at Webster University, while Sharpe is a professor at Webster as well. Similarly, Harris and Carbado are professors at UCLA’s School of Law and have addressed widely on race, gender, civil rights and constitutional issues. Both essays do a good job at explaining their ideas and supporting them with evidence of racial discrimination in our world today. The authors from both essays organize their ideas and summarize them, which helps understand the main idea of racism, discrimination and racial inequalities in today’s society.

According to the United States Department of Labor(2016), the unemployment rates among black americans was a staggering 8.6, compared to 4.1 with white americans as of October of 2016. This gap, although much smaller compared to thirty five years ago, shows no trend of changing. Unemployment rates among the minority citizens of america has been consistently about double that of white america for an extremely long amount of time, six decades to be exact, according to Pew Research Center (2013). This is not only an issue in the United States, in the UK nearly half of young black males looking for a job are unemployed. This shows that discrimination is not just a factor in today’s labor force in the United States, but throughout the world as

This study found that minorities were less likely to get hired, only 54% as likely as their white counterparts. The study also found that they were also paid less when hired by 12 percent. The last study in the article is a study that looked at the attitudes/behaviors of employers. Most employers stated they don’t look at race when they are reading applications. When the same employers were asked to describe the differences between employees in the work place they made prejudiced statements about employees based on their race. Racism still exists in the job market today and is affecting the ability for people of color to find jobs and to get the same pay rates as their white counterparts. The long term effects of this are detrimental.

“But race is the child of racism, not the father.” A quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book Between the World and Me encompasses the culture of racial bias toward the black community. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott are just a few names that represent the widespread, institutionalized racism embedded within our police and incarceration systems. From traffic stops to America’s prison population to mandatory minimums, racism is prevalent in every facet of America’s “domestic security” apparatus. Facing harsher punishment, 1 in 3 black men will go to prison and receive a 10% longer sentence than their white counterpart. Cocaine and Crack Cocaine are virtually the same substance but with vastly different mandatory minimum sentences. Cocaine is inhaled through the nasal cavity and Crack Cocaine is smoked with a pipe. Powder Cocaine is predominantly used by affluent white males while Crack Cocaine is predominately used by lower income black males. The mandatory minimum sentence for possession of 28 grams of Crack Cocaine is 5 years in prison while it takes 500 grams of Powder Cocaine to receive the same sentence. That comes out to nearly 18x harsher punishment for Crack Cocaine users, who are mostly black, than Powder Cocaine users. These are only few of the many injustices facing minority communities around the country that are brought fourth by an engrained stigma of racism within police forces and prison systems across the nation. Can these

In 2011, Jen Wang was finishing up her freshman year at Connecticut College. As a young girl growing up in New Jersey, Jen took her first SAT when she was in the sixth grade, long before other students her age would even start to think about college. Jen said that test preparations for standardized tests, like the SAT, took up most of her free time that could have been used to do other things (Billy). The SAT’s early intent was to open doors of higher education to students without traditional credentials, but now this test is held at high esteem, the biggest indicator of college success (Mulugetta). Although standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT are used to “level the playing field” for students across the country, these tests add little

In this article, “Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions” (2015), social scientist Sendhil Mullainathan interprets numerous amounts of case studies of how skin color affects African-Americans in normal routine things such as finding a job, buying a car or selling an IPod for example.

Communities all over the world deal with the multi faceted problem of biases, including racial bias. A Bias is defined as “prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair” (Dictionary.com, 2017).

It is easy to see that Black people are constantly bombarded by inequality in the work force. If there were inequalities just based on names of applicants just imagine the inequality when employers actually see the race of the applicants.

So many stories across the United States similar to this that at times is hard to prove due to privacy and no transparency. Why is it such a big issue on why a company would want to behave in this manner and not being fair? Blacks are subjected more to hostile work environments than whites and have to work much harder to prove they are qualified for the job than whites. Title VII of the Civils Rights Act of 1964 is supposed to protect the African Americans in the workplace, but for some companies it really does not mean anything and in most cases will try to work around it and get away with it. There are lawsuits that will never make it due to shortage of funds to proceed on making the

The overall goal of my interview processes and data collecting were to find answers to one question, “How do you believe race plays a factor in the ability to be hired for certain jobs?”. Also, I wanted to ask if any of the interviewees felt as if the inability to get the job was due to any stereotypes. Over the course of different people I interview I received a wide range of answers, many of those siding with the fact that race plays an enormous part, and most even having stories of how their race may have hindered or helped them in the past due to different racial stereotypes.

Racial bias is very prevalent in business hiring today. The idea of racial bias specifically against black people has been about equal to the discrimination that occurred in 1990 while the discrimination against Latino people has stayed steady over the last twenty-seven years (Sherman,2016). This shows that racial bias in business hiring is still very prevalent today, and action needs to be taken to prevent minorities with the same qualifications as whites from getting a job simply because of their race.

As an African American woman, I have been passed by on a few job opportunities because of the color of my skin. White men make higher wages than African American women. Another example, is when I was in high school and I was

Discrimination is also evident in employment. In the year 2000, students from the universities of Chicago and Washington teamed up to conduct a survey. They paired up a black man with a white man who were identical in almost every way, i.e.

Do Americans feel like there is still racial discrimination in today's everyday life? Racial discrimination is treating someone differently because of the color of his or her skin. Racial discrimination has been around for a long time. There are laws that are supposed to protect non whites from being racially discriminated against but these laws are not applied to everyone equally. There are a lot of different types of discrimination such as gender and age but the main type is racial. Racial discrimination still exist in America based on discrimination at work, police brutality, and arrest rates.

Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and Hank Greenberg all faced some sort of racism during their lives and their professional careers. Racism was found in every sport between the 1930s and the 1950s. Some sports hid the racism better than the others did. The role of racism and ethnicity in American sport did not change significantly between the 1930s and the 1950s.