Race and Culture in Our Society

Race in our culture has both positive and negative connotations.  While race may unite people of different countries and be a motivator of change, it has countless other affects such as internal warfare, genocide, hate crimes, and racism, and discrimination.  One of these also includes racial profiling.  In our modern culture profiling has become increasingly more common with terrorism ever lurking and the influx of illegal immigrants. 

Racial profiling has evolved from corrupt police officers pulling over teenage African-Americans for just driving around (driving-while black: DWB) to that and checking people of certain races at airports and border checkpoints.   This is not a biological concept, but totally a cultural one.  Because of prejudice over years with blacks, police and other law enforcement agencies will be biased to blacks committing crimes.

 The idea that African-Americans, dating back to the early days of the slave trade, need to be curbed on their actions and taken care of like little children, causes this dilemma of racial profiling with blacks.  The increased crime in African-American communities as a whole does not help the situation any.  The stereotype formed by just a few neighborhood stretches across to all other black communities.  My father used to tell me stories of how the police in the Indiana part of “Kentuckiana” would pull over young blacks and search their vehicles when they were clearly just going to and from work.           

Racial profiling has added the peoples of Hispanic origin to the list of “persons of interest.”   With an increase over the last twenty years of illegal (and legal) immigrants, many states have taken the initiative check the legal status of any “suspicious” individual.  And since profiling is illegal, all checks must be random.  This, of course, does not happen randomly.  A police officer or agency man who is corrupt will pull over based on race.  Hispanics are a red flag in their book, since they are the predominate race who might be illegal.  It is also curious of how the border between the United States and Canada is lightly guarded, with only a farmer’s fence in most places separating the two countries. In contrast, the U.S.-Mexico border which looks like the West Bank border in Palestine.  Since most Canadians are white there is less prejudice, but south of the border Hispanics are subject to discrimination.