Racism in Today\'s Society Some

Racism in Today's Society

Some people claim that racism is no longer a problem in the United States, citing the election of an African-American president and growing numbers of affluent and powerful minority individuals. Larger social issues such as homelessness, unemployment, and poverty all clearly show a racial division in this country, however, and show that racism is still an institutional and personal problem in this country (Marshall 2009).

There are other more specific instances of racism beyond the large demographic evidence. Racial profiling is still routinely practiced openly by many law enforcement agencies and officers, and by even more on an implicit level (Shah 2004). There are some who argue that, though counter-productive to modern society, racism is a natural outgrowth fo the human need for collectivism, which causes individuals to group together and generally includes exclusionary rules that are used to strengthen the group (Rand 1963). This was certainly the root of racism here, where various ethnicities and immigrant groups were used as forced cheap labor to strengthen the Anglo-European dominant forces in the country. It has even been shown that there is a psychological basis for the formation and perpetuation of racism in a society (Feinberg 2009). This makes it clear how the problem has been allowed to persist for so many years and so many generations.