The current events in the country, including the racial profiling of African Americans by police officers, have made race a delicate issue to speak about. Racial profiling is more commonly addressed in law and politics; however, it is also deeply rooted in today’s medicine. Physicians like Sally Satel, and researchers like Esteban Bruchard, encourage racial profiling by using race as an indicator for certain diseases and treatment. On the other hand, researcher Clarence Gravlee incorporates genetic ancestry and social aspects that can affect health outcomes, thereby demonstrating the importance of using other factors besides race. Racial profiling in medicine leads to race being used as a primary diagnostic tool, reinforces the idea that certain races inherit biological features, and it encourages a pharmaceutical market that targets specific races. Through a clinical lens, physicians like Satel are using race, in addition to typical factors like age and medical history, to treat and diagnose their patients. Satel claims that certain races are more prone to certain diseases, and by using their race it allows for a quicker differential diagnosis. She includes examples of racial differences seen in medical treatments, such as slower metabolism of antidepressants in African Americans, medications for heart failure more effective in whites, and higher salivation in African Americans during intubation. Yet, all her noted findings were refuted. For instance, careful review of
The first and most crucial step to solving an issue is to recognize that the issue actually exists. Many people fail to recognize that race has a correlation to the way that a person is treated in their society. In many aspects of American society, a person's race is a major determinant to how they are treated. Race impacts the way a person is treated in the workplace, by police and in the doctor’s office. Race grants privilege to those who it
Racial profiling remains a dormant issue in the United States. It is the act of the authority, mostly, police officers linking minority status to criminal behaviour (Glover, 2007). Several police officers in the United States target specific groups because they don’t display characteristics of typical Caucasian individuals (Glover, 2007). To put history into context, before 9/11, not many police officers profiled individuals based on their ethnic backgrounds but after the attack, there was an increase in racial profiling (Harris, 2006). A racial profiling method that became prevalent in the 1980s in the United States was administered by the U.S Drug Enforcement Administration. Operation Pipeline was a program that they launched to help police officers catch drug traffickers (Harris, 2006). In a video, they taught police officers to look for clues that would help them recognize criminals. It was noticed that police officers made a majority of stops to people with Hispanic last names (Harris, 2006). Marshall Frank, a former police officer was asked what police officers should do if they saw an African man driving around a white community. Frank responded by stating that the police officers should stop the vehicle and investigate the reason to why he was there even if there was no occurrence of a crime (Harris, 2006).
One of the most imminent threats looming within American society is race relations. America is a melting pot of different races, cultures, and religions, yet the matter of racial profiling still remains prominent today. By definition it is considered “an activity carried out by enforcers of the law wherein they investigate or stop any individual in traffic or round up people of the same race or ethnicity for crime suspicion” (NYLN.org ). This profiling has become a significant catalyst in the tension that has been ensuing between minorities and the government. Hostility has grown due to the apparent and intentional targeting of “brown people”, and
Have you ever been racially profiled while driving, shopping or while just walking in a particular neighborhood? Personally I have never been a victim of racial profiling, but I will be 16-years old this summer and able to drive to school, to a friends house or to shop at the mall. I realize that it is a possibility that I could be racially profiled at some point. There have been recent incidents that made racial profiling a very controversial issue. On February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, 17-year old African-American high school student walked through a gated community and was fatally shot after an altercation. Trayvon Martin’s parents strongly believed he was racially profiled, as stated in a news article
In the Justice System there are a lot of flaws that affect many people of color, and from past history, it has shown how these practices can lead to very unfortunate events, one of these practices is racial profiling. Racial profiling is when law enforcement uses race and ethnicity as grounds to determine if someone, typically of color, is guilty of doing something illegal. Racial profiling is a major problem in this country, this as well affects many citizens that are mainly of color because law enforcement usually sees them as targets, and it is important to improve and fixed this issue because there are many tragic incidents that have been caused of racial profiling.
Since the birth of our nation, racial profiling has been an issue longstanding and troubling among minority groups and still continues to exhibit severe consequences in communities.
In today’s world we deal with multiple cases of racial profiling seemingly on a daily basis. Turn on the television, check the internet, or simply have a discussion with someone and you’ll hear about it. "Racial Profiling" describes discriminatory practices by law enforcement officials who target people for suspicion of crime based on their ethnicity, race, origin, or religion. The term first came about during the War on Drugs in the 1970’s and 1980’s when law enforcement were accused of pulling over motorists simply because of their race, then unlawfully searching their vehicles for illegal substances. There are varying opinions about this topic and as the year’s progress, it seems acts of racism, labeling, and profiling increase. Many of the instances of racial profiling that occur today involve criminal justice.
One of the most discussed about issues in our society today is profiling based on race or ethnicity. But what is racial profiling and why is it so important? Racial profiling occurs when law enforcement agents impermissibly use race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin in deciding who to investigate for different crimes and offenses. It is being used unjustifiably wrongly in our culture daily. Based on the status of racial profiling currently, it seems as if racial profiling will always be a part of our society and there is nothing people can do to change that. With people making assumptions based on unjust rules, it seems like there will be no end in sight for racial profiling. Law enforcement should be held accountable for their actions, mistakes, and unjustified assumptions. Many instances occur with police officers taking wrongful actions solely based on race or nationality. Police and their practices have been going on for many years with the same outcomes repeating consecutively. A real- life instance of this includes police subjecting people to police brutality just because they are a “person of color” or even a “person of interest.” This has sparked protests and movements such as “Black Lives Matter” or “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.” Many people who have fallen victim to racial profiling and were wrongly accused and lost their lives as a result. Some of these people include, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, with the list continuing on. Trayvon Martin was shot and killed at seventeen years old for “looking suspicious.” Mike brown was shot six times for supposedly running away from a police officer. Eric Garner was put in a chokehold and subdued by a police officer for selling cigarettes illegally. Oscar Grant was already placed in handcuffs and lying flat on the floor when he was shot by a police officer that only served five years in prison. With countless others’ lives lost the list going on and on, it appears that racial profiling and bias have impacted affected a wide group of people and their families who have also suffered from this widespread issue. Overall, racial profiling is a big issue that might not be possible to correct
Even tho segregation was ended in 1964 it still exists today. Instead of being called segregation it's called racial profiling. Racial profiling is suspecting or targeting a person of a certain race, culture, and ethnicity. Three reasons why racial profiling still exists in America are there are many people who are living in fears of cultural stereotypes, profiling black people, and it's not only happening outside it's also happening in an educational place like schools.
When the scientific community begins to spread unfounded hypotheses regarding genetic differences between races, particularly differences that attribute poorer health or increased susceptibility to disease among minority groups, a Pandora’s Box is opened of potential dangers which can aid proponents of racist doctrines. Historically, scientific studies that sought to prove biological differences among races have led to violently racist movements like slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Hence, as other pharmaceutical companies follow NitroMed’s path and begin marketing drugs targeted for specific racial groups, the dangers of such race-based therapeutics must be acknowledged.
police because of the way they act and dress in public. American Civil Liberty Union
Gordon Moskowitz and his co-authors’ (2012) expands on this discussion of unconscious bias by associating it with stereotyping certain racial groups. The providers’ unconscious biases are referred to as implicit biases, and demonstrate usefulness if correctly used to identify groups more readily susceptible to a health condition than others (996). When used correctly to identify these individuals, patient outcomes have a positive outcome. However, a hasty assumption that leads to an incorrect stereotype results in severe negative outcomes from a resulting incomplete or inaccurate diagnosis by the physician (1000). These implicit biases also tie back to the previous theme
Racism and racial stereotypes have existed throughout human history. The radical belief associated by thinking the skin color, language, or a person’s nationality is the reason that someone is one way or another has become extremely detrimental to society. Throughout human existence it has sparked tension between groups of people and ultimately influenced wars and even caused slavery. Racism in America dates back to when Native Americans were often attacked, relocated, and assimilated into European culture. Since then, racism within the states has grown to include various other cultures as well. In the essays by Brent Staples, Bharati Mukherjee, and Manuel Munoz, they discuss the various causes as well as the effects that racial stereotyping can place on a victim and the stigma it leaves behind for the society to witness.
profiling when assessing a patient’s medical status can lead to serious medical errors. “A recent study of geographic patterns of genetic variation, found that commonly used ethnic labels are both insufficient and inaccurate representations of the inferred genetic clusters.” A doctor may automatically assume that an African American presenting with shortness of breath, and headaches has hypertension or high blood pressure. Ruling out that the patient may have heart problems such as cardiomyopathy or may have Anemia but because the patient was African American and presented with signs that most African Americans face the doctor assumed it would be high blood pressure.
The field of pharmacogenomics is concerned with how an individual’s genetic makeup affects their response to a drug (Johnson, 2001; US National Library of Medicine, 2016). The purpose of the resulting information is to successfully treat more patients, using a personalised approach to medicine (Xie and Frueh, 2005). Controversy was triggered when in 2005; a drug called BiDil was approved in the United States for the treatment of congestive heart failure in self-identified “black” patients. The consensus amongst geneticists is that race is largely a social construct (Kaplan, 2011) and globally, race is a way of categorising people by a small group of physical, social, or perceived ancestral characteristics (UNESCO, 1950). Racial discrimination is defined as one person being treated less favourably than another based on perceived inferiority due to their skin colour, race, ethnic background, or migrant status (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2014) - in direct contradiction to the World Medical Association’s Declaration where doctors swear to “not permit ... ethnic origin, ... nationality, ... race, ... or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient” (World Medical Association, 2006). Many legal checks are in place to prevent racial discrimination in medical treatment, which begs the question; how was a race-based drug approved?