Racial Bias In Education

Superior Essays
An Everyday Occurrence The concept of race has been used throughout generations of life to categorize people into dominant and subservient groups, which have also worked well as a tactic to keep inferior groups below their superior counterparts. If we take a look back on America’s history, this tactic of keeping inferior races down has always been existent from the moment of white colonization. Even though we don’t see lynched bodies, racial genocide, and slave plantations today, racism is alive and well in 2015 just as it was 200 years ago. Of course minorities don’t experience racism on such extreme levels, but we experience microaggressions, or subtle insults that may be intentional or unintentional, which carry underlining derogatory …show more content…
Maltreatment of minorities takes a long-lasting emotional toll, as human rights are constantly being violated and disregarded. The impact of systematic racism starts as early as elementary education. Educators that have a racial bias towards certain ethnic groups could negatively impact the academic growth of children as their education may lack key attributes for academic growth. Children of color that encounter racial bias in educational settings don 't realize the harmful extent of it until adolescence, where they can comprehend its malicious intent. An article called Social Inequality and Racial Discrimination: Risk Factors for Health Disparities in Children of Color states, children of color ages 3 to 4 years old are more likely to be shielded from racial discrimination and negative stereotypes by family members until they can comprehend it. “However, they are significantly influenced by parental attitudes and experiences concerning racial discrimination and by messages about race from macrosystem sources such as the media” (Kathy …show more content…
President John F. Kennedy first introduced Affirmative Action in 1961 when he called for an “aggressive” approach to hire more minorities in office (Robert Chrisman, pg. 1). Long after Kennedy’s reign, Affirmative Action has benefited many lives of minorities, especially African Americans, which has improved the material conditions for life of African Americans. As Affirmative Action “advocates for the structured readjustment and redistribution of economic resources among various social groups”, it has helped to increase the number of minority students enrolled in higher institutions of learning (2). Cedric Herring and Loren Henderson state in an article titled From Affirmative Action to Diversity: Toward a Critical Diversity Perspective, “affirmative action is based on the premise that to be truly effective in altering the unequal distribution of life chances, it is essential that employers and others take specific steps to remedy the consequences of discrimination” (Cedric Herring et al., pg. 3). They state that the root cause of racial discrimination begins with racially biased employers, and if you eliminate that racial bias, it will bring an influx of diverse employment, thus increasing the wellbeing of minorities (4). They also agree with Chrisman with this statement, “[Affirmative Action] is correlated with higher incomes and higher status jobs for racial

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