The Facts of Racial Profiling.

 Although we like to think that there
 is equality between blacks and whites in our country, the truth is, we are far from it. There has bee a constant struggle ever since the 1800's to treat blacks as equal as whites. We start with slavery, then to black codes, then to Jim Crow laws: The list code go on forever. Although we are no where near where we used to be, we still are racial profiling, especially when it comes to looking for suspects breaking the law to become incarcerated.


Unfortunately, people of color have been arrested at much higher rates than whites even when committing extremely similar times. The Huffington Post, "Black males had an imprisonment rate that was nearly seven times higher than the incarceration rate of white men". Seven times is such a staggering number to begin with, but we should also take population into consideration, which will makes theses numbers even more unfathomable. White people make up the supermajority at 72% of the U.S. population, while Blacks only make up a mere 13%. So, if we take population into consideration, Blacks are actually being imprisoned at a rate of 35% compared to whites.

Is it because of history that has made it harder for us to wrap our brains around that it is just color defining the people? Or is it the fact that some people are still for segregation as we have seen the many attempts to halt desegregation throughout our nations history.

Why do you think we are still "judging" people by the color of their skin? Do you think blacks are treated as equally as whites?

All comments are welcome!

Final Exam: Just Do It?

     As the first semester of American Studies has come to an end, I feel like I have become a more knowledgeable person about many different American topics and events in our history. One particular topic really stood out to me throughout the year: slavery.

    To the right, I chose to analyze a political cartoon about Nike sweatshop labor.  This artifact surfaced on an anti-sweatshop Ezine (a magazine only available on the web) right after a Bangladesh sweatshop fire in November of 2012 that killed 112 people and injured hundreds.

     This is an important American contemporary artifact because it depicts current "slave like" conditions, even though slavery was abolished over a century ago. The boss of the "sweatshop" I think is portrayed as a slave master. He has pointy "shark" like teeth, spikes on his shoes, he is triple the size of the workers. All these characteristics must instill great fear in the workers. A vary obvious feature of the man is that he is white, while all the the workers are colored, which make them look even more like "civil war era" slaves. The workers are weak, wearing the same outfit (in different colors), a minority race, and sitting on a bench working with a machine that has smoke spewing from it. If this image doesn't scream SLAVERY to you, you must be from another planet.

    This artifact relates to my American Studies class because we spent a lot of time talking about slavery, civil rights, and sweatshop labor. Throughout these past five months, our class has analyzed countless numbers of texting ranging from movies to short stories, so  I would like to analyze three different texts--a historical document, short story, NPR audio clip--and show the striking parallels between the texts and my artifact.