What Is 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.

Racial gerrymandering is also a conflict to the XIV Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because the district maps in Virginia’s case favors whites over African-Americans, giving them more votes in legislation of districts. African Americans don’t have an equal representation because of how the districts were drawn. Although the African-American population in Virginia isn’t much compared to the white population, that does not mean that the number of African-Americans should consist of one commonwealth representative. This exemplifies how African-Americans’ chance to obtain such a political position in Virginia is unfair as a result of gerrymandering.

Racial profiling has been in the news a lot lately with the deaths of black people such as Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both of whose deaths lead to public outroar, protests, and violent riots. Because of these and other deaths, people are beginning to open their eyes on the long standing issue. One of the first times that racial profiling was recognized as a problem was in the 1990’s with the beating of Rodney King. People were so upset when the officers were acquitted of their heinous crime that they started the most expensive riot in U.S. history, totaling over one billion dollars in damages.

American Heritage dictionary states that racism is “Discrimination or prejudice based upon race." That is exactly what racial profiling is. I am not however arguing that if a person is robbed says the criminal who robbed them was an adult black male that the police should look for everyone other than an adult black male for that crime, but also not try and use that information to persecute younger black males. However, that is not considered profiling in that instance, it is not based on demographics or statistics, and it is based upon actual information about the specific person who did the crime.

Along with misogyny and LGBT+ phobia, racism is one of the many methods of discrimination and bias that still exists today in America. It affects many ethnicities; Asian, Latino, even Indigenous Americans, but racial bias in the United States today especially focuses on African Americans as it did since the times of slavery. How does the race system still exist? The answer is simple; racial bias, like a living creature, will constantly adapt to its surroundings as time passes. Michelle Alexander’s nonfiction book, The New Jim Crow (2010), discusses the several changes made to the racial caste system following slavery and how most African Americans themselves cannot see it in its form today.

Although we seem to see a new news story every day concerning racial bias and blatant racism, it is not a new issue. “We have been engaging in this conversation for as long as I can remember. Fighting this fight for centuries. Caught in a cycle of bias for as long as they can remember.” (Nichols) I believe all the adversity we are facing as a country today can be attributed to the attitudes of the early American settlers who laid the basis for our bias as a country. In fact, historians date racism in America as far back as the 1500’s with the beginning of the Middle Passage and our first look into racially profiling individuals for slavery.

“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

Race discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because he/she is of a certain race or because of personal characteristics associated with race (such as hair texture, skin color, or certain facial features). Color discrimination involves treating someone unfavorably because of skin color complexion.

ATTENTION: How is justice presented in our society? No one likes to be treated unjustly. No matter what your race may be or what gender you are; everyone should be treated fairly. For the world to have a moral society, people have to see each other without a sense of bias. When people base their opinions on one aspect of a person, they begin to judge them and look down on them. Justice can be apprehended when everyone is seen as equal and human, no matter what race or gender. The concept of stereotyping places a false impression on a group of people and makes others see them differently than who they are. If people would push back the assumptions that all people who have the same beliefs or ideas are exactly alike, everyone would be viewed

In the article The World Is Not Black and White: Racial Bias in the Decision to Shoot in a Multiethnic Context Implicit racial biases were examined in the decision to shoot potentially hostile targets in a multiethnic context. Results of two studies showed that college aged participants and police officers showed anti-black racial bias in their response times: the participants were quicker to “correctly” shoot armed black men or targets and to indicate “don’t shoot” for unarmed Latino, Asian and white targets. In addition to this, the police officers showed racial biases in response times toward Latino versus Asians or whites, and surprisingly, toward whites versus Asians (Sadler, Correll, Park, Judd, 2012, pg.286). These results also

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).

Bias is the conviction that with people from no less than one race are below average contrasted with people from various races. Generally, this perspective furthermore incorporates the conviction that one 's own race is superior to anything distinctive races. People are

Racial bias is still a very active issue in society today. This paper explores the understanding of racial bias in business hiring. This is critical because racial bias continually uniforms businesses in hiring decisions. The prevalence of racial bias in business hiring, potential interventions, and explanations of why this occurs will be explored. How prevalent is racial bias in business hiring today and how can it be mediated?

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.