Racism Towards African-Americans In The 1920's

Black Boy Research Paper Has racism towards African-Americans in the United States improved? Or are we still stuck in the racist era of the 1920’s, even after efforts from the Civil Rights Movement? Today, American-Americans still suffer from racism despite all the efforts with the Civil Rights Movement to put an end to racism once and for all. Though racism towards black people has improved greatly since the 1920s-1960s, there are still many major issues that African-Americans face. Richard Wright, the author of his own autobiography, Black Boy, accounts his experiences and struggles of growing up in the racist conditions of the South during the 1920s and 1930s. If Wright were writing an autobiography today in 2017 about a black boy growing …show more content…
Police brutality has been a major issue ever since Wright was growing up, and has peaked with killings of innocent lives during recent years. African-Americans are a huge part of the statistics of people dead from police brutality, making up a fourth of these statistics, twice as much the percentage of their population. Wright would be very horrified by these statistics, and would feel that the issue of racial violence has not improved much since the past. In Jerome Karabel’s article, Karabel touches on the topic of police violence in America. He states “...in Germany in 2012, a total of seven people were killed by the police, and in England a single person was killed in 2013 and 2014 combined. And Japan, a nation of 126 million people that is as nonviolent as the US is violent, had no police killings over the past two years.” Based on this quote, Richard would feel that America is not an ideal place to live in because of the extremely high rates of violence compared to other countries. The problem of police brutality originates from the poor training that these police receive. Karabel points out in his article that “police officers interact with civilians about 63,000,000 times a year and are assaulted in 0.09 percent of all interactions, injured in 0.02 percent, and killed in 0.000008 percent.” Based on these statistics, police do not have a reason to be killing as many innocent lives as they are. The “fear” instilled in them towards black people is evidently racist. “Working in a society marked by high rates of homicidal violence and a pervasive mistrust, rooted in centuries of racial conflict, between minority communities and law enforcement, the police in the United States are in urgent need of training that meets the highest international standards.” Wright would agree with this statement, because he has seen first-hand poor police training