Discrimination in the United States Today

Last Updated: 02 Apr 2020
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Two blue and white school buses pull out of TC Williams High School parking lot destined for Gettysburg College, the site for this summer's football camp. Parents looked on with expressions of disgust and worry as their sons disappeared around the corner, now under control of the new black head coach, Herman Boone. Every seat on the bus was to be occupied by one white and one black football player. Players either stared off into space or out the window in order to avoid any contact with the player sitting beside them.

The year was 1971 and this was going to be the first season the Titans played as an integrated school with both blacks and whites on the football team. The season would be characterized by hate, crime, brotherhood and determination and triumph. Despite their differences in appearance and the disapproval of the town they left behind, the team would need to come together as brothers to bring home the perfect season so that everyone would remember the Titans.

According to Merriam – Webster dictionary, the definition of racism is “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human trait and capacities and racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (Merriam Webster Dictionary 484). Racism has existed in our culture throughout human history in many different forms. Differences in skin color, language and customs have influenced the way people view and treat others. Racism has influenced past wars with slavery, caused segregation in the US in the 1960s and early '70s, and is present still today in the form of discrimination.

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The first documented form of racism in the US may have been slavery. Even though slavery was eventually banned in America, segregation continued. Not until many years later did the blacks received the same rights as white people. Still today, racism between ethnic groups is evident in the form of discrimination. Despite the efforts many have made to put an end to racism, eliminating all traces of it is ultimately impossible. Racism is still alive and well in the United States today.

Issues on racial profiling, corporate downsizing, layoffs in the industry, racial and class segregation, hyper – segregation, economic racism and institutional racism are but just some of the living proofs to this kind of discrimination happening around us. It has been a struggle our forefathers have battled out and today, it has still not seen an end. It has and still continues to endure since time immemorial. The struggle to impede partiality from affecting law enforcement practices is as patriarchal as the Constitution of the United States itself.

Also adversely, for the most part of our past, partiality peace enforcement – founded on fear rather than evidence – has been prevalent and futile (ACLU 4). Since the disaster of September 11, America have witnessed a boost in the country's desire to let pass law enforcement and defense practices founded mainly on skin pigmentation or other permanent attributes, and a certain desire on the end of the present administration to administer such procedures (ACLU 4). The country's Asian, Muslim and Arab populace are very much affected by such physical assaults.

Rules chiefly laid out to impact specific classes usually end in the damage of the human rights of everyone involved. Furthermore, racism causes the United States to be less secure as a nation, considering the inadequate law enforcement assets are redirected and people who would rather not to be subjected to government perlustration are pinpointed (ACLU 4). The disaster of September 11 has created general counter – immigrant perception tolerable in the law enforcement and civil defense actions integrate prejudice into their implementation (ACLU 4).

Ever since the disaster of the September 11 insurgent assault, it has been the legitimate tactics of the administration to hold, cross – examine and arrest beyond criminal offense - usually for long – term on the grounds of their native roots, race and faith. Actually, the very insertion of civil defense exclusion in the guidelines is an affirmation by the justice department that depends on racism and discrimination in its local anti – insurgent efforts (ACLU 5). Racism is at all times at odds with the nation's central statutory principles of impartiality and justice.

Law enforcement founded on general attributes in the likes of ethnicity, faith and native roots, instead on the analysis of a person's conduct, is a faulty and useless action for guaranteeing civil (ACLU 6). During the times shortly after the September 11 insurgent attacks, the justice department began what measured to a comprehensive agenda of defensive arrest. It was the initial huge – scope arrest of a set of people on the grounds of their native roots or descent since the inhumation of Japanese – American at the time of the Second World War.

In the period of the insurgent assaults, civic personnel pierced through Asian, Muslim and Arab territories all over the United States, grabbing them from pathways, and even inside their residences, offices and places of worship (ACLU 9). The cluster and detention of a large number of the population were subjected under a strange disguise of cover - up, abandoning wives, offspring, schoolmates and bosses suspecting the victim's whereabouts and speculating on the identity of the next captive (ACLU 9).

The individual expenses of the authority’s racism policies are immeasurable: diligent, obedient citizens abruptly finding themselves bound arms and foot, detained incommunicado in lone incarceration for over a month each; estranged from relations; residences and workplaces lost and existence flipped right side facing down. For most people, the ultimate defeat of all time is actually the harsh discovery that the place they came to call as their own, the very one which swore liberty and prospective, favored them no more (ACLU 11).

The application of segregating by ethnic group, background, faith or native land runs opposite to what is questionably the central theory of democracy: each and everyone are made equal, and are at liberty must be dealt with unvaryingly by the government, notwithstanding immutable self like skin pigmentation, religion, ethnic or national roots (ACLU 18). For both citizens, either Black or Brown, racial discrimination connotes shorter, not so healthy, less – esteemed lifestyles. Racial discrimination verdict class philosophies and is the thought and tradition of white domination.

It is the system of racism and repression based on skin pigmentation, physical appearances, roots and ethnicity. Its foundations can be traced as a validation for slavery and the invasion of the people of the United States. Ever since, slavery in America was attached to the progress and evolution of capitalism. Based on the trade and possession of human beings on the grounds of their physical appearances and skin tone, its idea was the manipulation of unsettled labor for great earnings.

As properties, Africans were sought as if they were animals, brought to now the United States, and then traded on public sale like creatures of inconvenience. Native American Indians suffered the same fate as their African counterparts as they too were murdered on a huge scale (Marshall NP). Ethical and logical reasoning were invented to give reason for this capture, trade, enslavement and mass killings against humanity. As a philosophy, racial discrimination presented the ethical and logical foundations of slavery, the spreading out of colonialism further to the west and the capture of Mexico’s other half.

Hence the reason of this set of guidelines was, and even until now is, to set further views and philosophies based on the illusion that people of darker tones are innately low-grade (Marshall NP). The racially prejudiced utilization of the crime subject, increasing chauvinistic and law enforcement aggression, intensifying separation, criminalization, immigrant – related assaults, rising poverty, living rough and joblessness, amplifying typecasts in media and environmental racial discrimination all signify the intensity of the crisis (Marshall NP).

The leanings must be viewed in the perspective of the strengthening of the class efforts. Corporate curb and mass dismissal in the business have resulted to an general drop in the standards of living by the blue – collar workers, particularly the ethnically and nationally demoralized components, and have aggravated the development of racial discrimination. There is a direct relationship between these subject matters (Marshall NP). Capitalism’s general predicament combines a brand new aspect to these issues. Corporate curb and mass dismissal have swept out a lot of the previous reaps opposed to racism in the industry.

As the fiscal crisis intensifies, contemporary types of economic racial discrimination are making their presence felt (Marshall NP). Huge rate of joblessness and demarcation are its most straight and stunning result. Rising figures of unemployment cases concerning Asians and their African American counterparts are twice the rate of the Whites. Prolonged joblessness is also exceptionally grave. A huge fraction of those living in the rough are Latinos and Black. Economic racial discrimination’s dreadfulness is mostly observed on its effect on Latinos and Black youths, who predominantly live in penury (Marshall NP).

A main attribute of the growth of racial discrimination at the present moment is the height of quality of separation. Segregation has hastened rather than degenerated and happened to be more severe, depicted by pressing destitution and awfully meager situations of life. This is grounds for closer scrutiny of the implication of segregation these days, as more than a consequence of fiscal factors but as a conscious business and administration policy, with far – reaching repercussions (Marshall NP).

It is a consequence of business and administrative policies counting red – lining as well as the former President Reagan’s and current administration’s bureaucrats’ slashes in housing and municipal expenditures, which have brought about the damage of metropolitan zones. The damage on national support for developing and maintaining civic housing projects has lead to disastrous outcomes; other than this is the former President Clinton’s bureaucrats’ unsympathetically racist and influential scheme to utilize HUD taxes to construct prisons (Marshall NP).

Ethnic and class separation has created a segregated institutional organization, and played a role in the sudden descending glide of the quality of learning made available for both Latinos and Black youths of society particularly in the United States. The privatization of municipal education is aggravating this crisis and bringing new disparities into the scene (Marshall NP).

The problem of segregation confronting all ethnically and nationally demoralized and particularly African Americans are the straightforward consequences of the organizational problems specifically during the later parts of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the industrial cut back of the 1990s. These cultures and neighborhoods must be regarded as an indispensable feature of the particular repression of these peoples – group, ethnic and national – and a way of manipulating and slashing these neighborhoods off from the rest of humanity and of actually isolating the blue collar workers (Marshall NP).

Recent reports directs to what is called hyper – segregation of African Americana within the country’s major industrial metropolises namely Houston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago, metropolises in which the organizational problems and prolonged and generational redundancy have been deeply felt. Hyper – segregation encompasses the topographical, political, fiscal and social segregation of ```the aforementioned neighborhoods. It exposes that racial discrimination aimed at the African Americans has a exceptional feature and has arrive at a contemporary and unparalleled phase (Marshall NP).

Economic racial discrimination is also associated with the issues of metropolises, where the most neighborhoods are situated. As central industries set out, services are permitted to deteriorate, lanes disintegrate, bridges collapse. Here, the drug use and abuse goes on increasingly, mortality rates sky rocket levels much higher those in the less developed countries, and illnesses such as tuberculosis and AIDS are almost uncontrollable. Here the neighborhoods are in a virtual situation of obstruction as racist law enforcers, under the excuse of combating drugs, threaten and coerce.

Here, people of color particularly the younger ones are regularly curved up in speed, and have crammed the country’s penitentiary and detention centers almost to a spill over, African American adolescents amounting to approximately 35%, either in detention centers or subjected to the jurisdiction of the criminal justice organization (Marshall NP). Nationality, sex and background in the business realm must not be a problem. Instead, working well in a diversified environment must be everyone’s aim (Ishimaru NP). Varied sets of skills are in tall order particularly in the American offices these days.

But then again, a certain race in itself cannot possibly make it all happen. At this point, diversity fulfills its real essence. Various people from every civilization must share and value each other’s outlooks and beliefs to be able to come off a solution to a crisis and ultimately cause success not just for themselves but for the team they work with (qtd. in Ishimaru NP). Every industry should aspire to diversify. Certainly, it is the proper way to go. Diversity in the business world makes a good logical in itself. It requires thoughtfulness, visualization and commitment to be momentous.

Furthermore, it commands eagerness to scrutinize the conventional way of handling business and what is prized in its employees (Ishimaru NP). To be able to produce advancement as far as diversity in the business world is concerned, it is vital to re-evaluate one’s principles and be able to communicative what merit is really about. As people keep on diversifying even more, elevating workers who displayed an ability to diversify to communicate well with his co – employees setting apart aside social discrimination must be highlighted (Ishimaru NP).

Studies confirm that operating in a diversified setting is associated with more important associations. Moreover, more friendships between different races are also created in this place. “The ethnically varied neighborhood is also a model of a diversified surrounding (Estlund 10). There are reasons to trust that the distinctly augmented occurrence of reported friendship between people from diverse backgrounds is founded chiefly from improved relations and incorporation in the business realm. Yet in the greater scheme of things, it is more than a friendship tale.

It also speaks of the common but spread out implication of connectedness that shell out of the daily cooperation, informal sociability, mutual welfare, whines, achievements and frustrations among co – workers. All the same, their positive feature is suggested by the occurrence with which they are able to establish real friendship that transcends social discrimination. Racial conflict and segregation is still alive and well. Even so, they were definitely narrowed and combined with thoughts of harmony, respect, friendship and resemblance (Estlund 11).

In point of fact, it is only in the business realm where a more lasting and mutual interaction is possible. It is the only place where one can actually see it happen. Every person must search for to be able to team up with their co – workers in any place and time. This type of team up must be made amongst people of diverse roots, ethnic set and gender. Diversity in the business realm, affairs and association that go beyond social discrimination can be counted on to bring about heightened approval and empathy. Besides, it can perhaps form less hostility and typecasting amongst diverse roots, ethnic set and custom (Estlund 12).

African – American middle school learners are sensitive regarding the issue of racial discrimination and are willing to voice out their thoughts about the topic at hand. Thoughts of injustice and prejudice associated to race will take place specifically in a teacher relationship, which is made difficult by problems of command and influence (Melvin 37). The condition of the increasing population of pupils from ethnic minorities in public institutions and the majority of white instructors in the public institutions is a crisis.

White instructors need to rethink the crisis of the failure of various pupils from ethnic minorities in the institutions. Instructors nowadays hardly ever display explicit racial discrimination, but may unintentionally act discriminatorily in concealed and understated ways. As a result of placing the burden of achievement in institution completely upon a pupil from an ethnic minority, the instructor does not reflect on his role in creating the institution a positive learning ground.

The floor is certainly amassed against people from ethnic minorities and instructors in an undersized way have the capability to offset the effects of racial discrimination. Definitely, there are a lot of other aspects that be part of the cause of a pupil success like a supportive family. Still, white instructors lean to classify these aspects with the consequence of holding responsible the victim and omitting the reality that the true rival is institutional racial discrimination.

White instructors must to be not as much concerned about being branded racially prejudiced and be less troubled with contesting such accusations whenever they are expressed by pupils. Rather, instructors should to observe how their own actions, both with respect to their dealings with pupils and their selections of classroom matter to guarantee that they are doing everything feasible to assist pupils from ethnic minorities to succeed (Melvin 39). The asset of the United States as a country has been rooted in its ability to distinguish and nurture its diversity.

Its blend of diversity has been a collage of expressions and outlooks that collaborated to clothe the country to be unified, in a never ending quest for life, liberation and sovereignty for all. While there will always be disagreements on the ways and measures that gets in the way of success, may all rise up every single day, and safeguard the nation’s ability to expressive what it deems as its absolute right to be heard exercising its people’s freedom of speech (Jones NP). Hope should remain. Hope in the odd that living in an ethnically diversified world is feasible.

More than being an odd, it is the kind of life everyone else must work hard to achieve. A life that is lived in accord between people regardless of native roots is an ideal kind of life. It is certainly a kind of life that transforms and surpasses boundaries formerly defined, aimed for the betterment of all (Racebridges. net NP). As we close the chapter on one heritage recognition to bridge the pages to the next, may everyone else never forget that the United States was molded on the hard labors of its immigrant populace.

Having come from the Plymouth Rock, or from the weight of servitude, the force has been established and set free of the control of racial discrimination (Jones NP). For everyone to gaze further at the road that lie ahead, it is necessary to set sights on the rear view mirror to keep certain that alarming signs of the threats that lies further on are not overlooked. It is important to study, assess and commemorate history, or be condemned in recurring failures habitually. The past should be the handbook and experience must be the lead. It is there to serve as a reflection of the path yet to be (Jones NP).

Ethic and socio – economic condition are amid the most well-known kind of inter – class affairs that mirrors kinds of social discrimination in the country. Whenever social discrimination is present, prejudice is a crucial feature of inter – class affairs. Prejudice can function to underpin the representational borders that divide ethnic class from one and the other (MacArthur & MacArthur NP). Racial discrimination is as relevant a subject matter at present as it was two decades ago (Miles168). Quite the opposite of other age group the world today is typically more and varied, mobile and integrated than it has ever been.

These days, people find themselves living in a world with not only complete strangers, rather quite particularly exceptional individuals (Estlund 20). In our day than ever before, it is critical that all people take a firm position against racial discrimination. Everyone must stay alert and prepared to battle it out in opposition to those who longs to segregate and demoralize societies on grounds of race, background, ethnic group, faith or principles. A hate – provoked offense against members of a specific race is still an assault all of humanity. We are constantly challenged by racial discrimination in every aspect of society.

Countless marginal neighborhoods are still subjected to different faces of racial discrimination and racist brutality. For most neighborhoods, the racist danger has augmented. There is a need for efficient and impartial actions to deal with all forms of racial discrimination. The governmental structure counter racism or hostility have not yet stood firmly on its ground, in some parts of the country still needs execution. There is a need to enforce it successfully and noticeably. Victims must recognize that their encounters of racial discrimination will be critically dealt with by powers that be.

Perpetrators of the crimes must be made aware that their deeds will not be allowed by the world. For one, the possibility of creating deep and multi –thread ties grounded on resemblance is nothing sort of usual. On the contrary, the possibility of creating ties that surpasses social discrimination thrives. However, establishing such kind of ties that surpasses social discrimination is not quite simple. By not counting on the help of a certain amount of force, this type of ties is unfeasible. All the same when it carried out, it is perhaps more lean and more awkward that the type of ties grounded on resemblance (Estlund 20).

To all intents and purposes, these ties can foster trust. It can generate a sense of togetherness, harmony for a reason. Ultimately, compounded with the development towards objectivity and integration in the office and beyond, trust could be encouraged as well (Estlund 20). In spite of everything, no one person can possibly live solely by himself. It is man’s basic nature that requires him to establish and interconnection with his neighbors. The world exists to blend diverse civilization. This is just but one of the certainties in this world.

Instead of isolating oneself from his neighbors whom he perceives to be unlike himself, may everyone else simply learn to love and embrace his own as well as his neighbor’s individuality. The diversity in this world is worth more than its simple meaning. It exists to be a living reminder of the real essence of man’s uniqueness. It is there to impart the lesson to all ears that need to hear that differences in all intents and purposes are the common ground where people of all races and places can meet half way. And all else is better taken a step further from there. Firm rebuff of the racist philosophy is necessary for everyone.

Impartiality, non – existence of prejudice and deference for the human civil liberties of all are frequent threads in our culture, which highlight the battle in opposition to racism. They are an essential part of one’s commitment to his neighbors. It is not simply a subject for institutional action. There is a demand to remain united in the battle in opposition to racism and succeed. It is a form of corruption to the future and a renouncement to the common codes of conduct if with consent the racist is permitted to develop a scheme wherein the people’s actions are deemed to be normal.

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Discrimination in the United States Today. (2016, Aug 22). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/discrimination-in-the-united-states-today/

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