Racial Profiling And African Americans - 1897 Words

The recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri has really put things in a different perspective regarding the treatment of African Americans. The protesting has called attention to the ghastly reality that African Americans still face an ongoing struggle and receive inferior treatment. Violent events occurring years after the 1960 s Civil Rights Movement—from the beating of Rodney King to the homicide of Trayvon Martin and the countless crimes in between—all reveal evidence of how African Americans are victims of injustices. While substantial progress has occurred in obtaining equality for African Americans during the last five decades, African Americans still battle discrimination on a daily basis in which they fall victim to degrading†¦show more content†¦These heavily populated minority neighborhoods are usually served by poor public education and safety systems. Housing discrimination contributes to more costly housing for people of color, furthering the economic divide between whites and African Americans. Due to an increasing open promotion of inequality, the plight of African Americans ultimately undermines the premise that all Americans are entitled to equal under the law and further disadvantages people of color. Dehumanizing representations of African peoples and the history of the black-ape metaphor are nothing new to America. Thanks to basic evolutionary theories, the African-American community has become subject to dehumanizing and discouraging associations, such as the black-ape association. According to speculations from Franz Boas and Charles Darwin, There might be an evolutionary spectrum among primates containing monkeys and apes at the least evolved end continuing through savage and/or deformed anthropoids, and culminating with Whites at the other end as most evolved (Lott 152). From speculations such as these, scientists theorized that people from Africa existed somewhere between the deformed and the simian. Ultimately, theo ries of evolution exhibited an unrealistic observation that people of African descent are less civilized compared to whites. Theories of evolution humiliate the African race and contribute to