Racial Profiling in America

     Being an everyday citizen of America, you come in contact with racial profiling all throughout your life. By far, this is one of the biggest and saddest problems across the nation. Whether or not you see a news report of another death where an officer racially profiled a man or your high school history teacher racially profiles the black individual next to you as a thug, racial profiling exists everywhere in our society today.
    For my last two years of high school, I went to a predominantly white private school in Southaven, Mississippi. While I was there I played girl's basketball, and we were able to go on and win state those two years. Despite of our success, our guys team was one of the worst in the league by far. After I graduated, six black individuals transferred to my old high school to play basketball. Many individuals within our surrounding schools, community, and region began to ask many racially profiled questions about the students that transferred. Questions and statements being, "How are they paying for a private education?" or "The team will be much better now because of "them". This situation hit deep with me because I transferred just like these individuals, and none of these profiled claims was ever said because of my situation. When in reality, I had to be granted a hardship just like those six students as well as being apart of a basketball team.
     This was very eye opening for me because while I do live in Mississippi, I live right past the border of Tennessee, so you do not always see the racial tendencies that the south regions of Mississippi to hold. This situation, however; showed that racial profiling is everywhere. The problem is that this is a problem throughout the whole nation, not just the south. There are many movements and steps throughout the nation that are being taken to try and shut this problem down, but to what point do they actually begin to affect all parts of America? An article states, "Date and anecdotal information from across the country reveal that racial minorities continue to be unfairly victimized when authorities investigate, stop, frisk, or search individuals based upon subjective identity-based characteristics rather than indentifiable evidence of illegal activity."(1) This statement alone shows the bigger problem our nation is contributing to today. Where does this stop? What moves do we take as a country to eliminate this looming problem of racial profiling? Do we try to fix this problem by starting small or going big?


(1) "Institutional Racism - MLK Dream." Google Sites. https://sites.google.com/a/bnths.nthls.com/mlk-dream/home/dream-fulfilled/3.