Writing On The Wall: Racial Profiling In The United States

Previous decades have been plagued with slavery and civil rights, but injustices still exist in today’s society such as prejudice based on social class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, occupation, education and religion. Although civil rights movement was seen as a heroic and victorious episode in the U.S.’s history about equal citizenship rights between African-American and whites, the inequality and prejudice about African-American is still a painful blain. It’s not hard to find various cases about racial profiling and criticism towards police officers for excessive force. Many innocent people became the victims of this cognitive bias such as Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown… Some of the victims were killed, some of the victims were arrested and some of the victims remained unknown. Therefore, people will have a closer look to what actually happened to American criminal justice system and how it connected to social problems by reading the book Writing on the Wall, written by …show more content…
According to the New York Civil Liberties Union’s analysis of NYPD traffic stops in 2011, young black men made up 25.6% of NYPD stops while young white men only made up 3.8%. However, in nearly nine out of ten searches, police found nothing (Natarajan 2014). Similarly, a review of data from the Oakland Police Department in 2013 showed that in an eight-month period, African-Americans made up 62% of the people were stopped for questioning while whites only took 12%. It proved that lower-class communities are subjected to a higher percentage of stops, interrogations, suspicions and searches. Regarding to the label theory in In Conflict and Order: Understanding Society, people who were labeled as a deviant not just because of their luck or random selection, but because of the systematic societal biases against the powerless such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Middle