Racial Profiling and Discrimination in America Today

Historical Roots of Racial Discrimination in America

Slavery in the United States formally began during the late seventeenth century, when the country was still a British colony. The institution then expanded and intensified rapidly during the eighteenth century, reaching its peak at the start of the nineteenth. During most of this time, for all intents and purposes, simply to be Black was enough to identify one as a slave. Racial distinctions between whites and people of color were not merely noted — they comprised the economic and legal foundation of American society. Once slavery was abolished, Black Americans did not suddenly occupy a station equal to that of their white contemporaries. Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws were in effect, usually in the South, and other forms of segregation were commonplace throughout the nation.

In the poem "Outcast," Claude McKay clearly identifies the prejudice and alienation he faces as a legacy of slavery and of the forceful removal of Africans from their ancestral homelands (McKay 198). Racial discrimination in the United States is more easily understood when viewed in this wider context of American history: it can be hardly surprising that racism still exists in a country whose economy was propelled early on by race-based slavery, let alone one in which legal segregation was the norm until far more recently. Franklin's story "The Train from Hate" is a succinct illustration of life during a time of strict racial segregation: a train conductor could simply remove a Black family from a train for entering the white coach, even when it was the only available entrance (Franklin 223).

Police Brutality and the Black Lives Matter Movement

Today, one of the major forms of discrimination facing Black Americans is the disproportionate policing of Black communities and the impunity with which police officers often brutalize or even kill members of those communities. The Black Lives Matter movement exists specifically to draw attention to these issues. Unarmed Black men — often teenagers or young adults like Michael Brown — are frequently shot to death under suspicious circumstances, leading in most cases to nothing more than paid administrative leave with no real consequences for the offending officer. The callous disregard for Black lives displayed in these instances is hardly a far cry from the coldness with which the family was treated in Franklin's story.

Islamophobia, Foreign Policy, and the Profiling of Non-Black Minorities

Dwight Okita's poem "In Response to Executive Order 9066" shows how the dehumanization of an entire racial minority affects children as well as adults. A fourteen-year-old girl would normally be regarded as a paragon of innocence, relatively uninformed about political affairs and generally sympathetic. However, in the context of World War II and Roosevelt's executive order, she comes to be viewed not as an innocent child but as a possible enemy spy (Okita 198). Under different circumstances, another form of white supremacist ideology made it possible for a police officer to kill twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, perceiving him as a menace and a violent threat.

Okita also reminds us that Black Americans are not the only racial minority who face constant profiling. At the current historical moment in America, many Arab and South Asian Americans are also — correctly or not — perceived as Muslim and accused of terrorism or of upholding a fundamentally violent religious system. In reality, Islam is no more inherently violent than Christianity, as even a cursory glance at the Bible will reveal. However, attributing grotesque violence and barbarism to the Muslim religion is far easier for many people than acknowledging the ways in which Western imperialism shaped the modern Middle East.

Not only does racial profiling in this case affect those perceived as Muslim in America, but it also shapes American foreign policy. Islamophobic and ultimately racist views are largely responsible for Americans' continued support of certain foreign-policy positions, and the war in Iraq similarly gained whatever support it did through racist rhetoric and assumptions. In these cases, Americans' racism informs their views on foreign policy, which in practice perpetuates the very systems of inequality and scarcity that are then perceived by Americans as necessary outcomes of Islam or Arab culture. This feedback loop is often at work in racist ideologies: they borrow a veneer of legitimacy by moralizing against the same conditions they exist to promote.

Works Cited

Franklin, John Hope. "The Train from Hate." In Missy James and Alan P. Merickel, eds., Reading Literature and Writing Argument. Fifth Edition. New York: Longman, 2012.

McKay, Claude. "Outcast." In Missy James and Alan P. Merickel, eds., Reading Literature and Writing Argument. Fifth Edition. New York: Longman, 2012.

Okita, Dwight. "In Response to Executive Order 9066." In Missy James and Alan P. Merickel, eds., Reading Literature and Writing Argument. Fifth Edition. New York: Longman, 2012.