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Racial Profiling And Stereotypes

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Many People presume racial profiling is a recent phenomenon that occurred in the 80s as the news about African Americans being pulled over for “driving while black” made national headlines. “Racial Profiling,” however, has endured in various forms for decades in black communities from the slave trade, Jim Crow laws and in its most recent form as discriminatory conduct from Police Department personnel to the Criminal Justice System. Three Hundred years of unfair racialized practices that date back to the 1700s in the United States for people of African descent (1). Racial profiling is racism and stereotypes by others and the police that assume the worst about people based on racially biased perceptions that are projected, multiplied, and start …show more content…

The majority of Blacks, in the 1700’s, were slaves on Plantations in South Carolina and other southern states. When leaving the plantation blacks had to show a pass to prove they had permission to leave the planation or, if free they had to carry what were called freedom papers to verify their freedom. In the 1700’s Black people as in its new 20th-century modernity of “stop and frisk” are stopped using racial profiling protocols. Also, they were subject to harassment, interrogation beatings, and even death by lynching (hanging) if they were found to have run away from a plantation …show more content…

Despite the fact that slavery was abolished 300 years ago, the hegemon of racial profiling in 2017 is perpetuated locally as well as worldwide via the media and other factors that foster blackness and racist association of dark skin with criminality and wrongdoing (9). The false perception that African Americans violate drug laws in greater numbers justifies racial profiling and disparities in rates of arrest and incarceration of blacks and other ethnic minorities Egregious actions as most arrests centered on racial profiling are made for the crime of misdemeanor drug possession (10). The Irony is “drug possession is a crime every drug user commits” and, in the United States, most drug users are white, yet a white drug user is not arbitrarily racially profiled, stopped and frisked at the same rate as blacks other minorities. And whites may be given a warning by police to get help for their addiction problem or recreational drug use if it is out of

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