In these few blog posts I have briefly looked at the changing demographics of the United States and how those have and haven’t affected race relations; also how they will potentially affect the United States in the future.
In order for the conversation around race to move forward we all must acknowledge that there is something to talk about. As I have been thinking about how we all definitely need to progress in our dialogue around race before we become a fully minority nation, I have been recalling all the discussions that were sparked by the Trayvon Martin incident and people’s reaction to police/neighborhood-watch profiling. These sorts of profiling instances happen everyday. I recently heard a story about how two kids at Georgetown were smoking weed on a dorm rooftop, one kid was white and another was black. The white kid was the one who had the joint and was blowing out smoke when the Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers came up, but the DPS officers separated them, questioned the black kid and let the white kid walk away. The black kid was written up and the white kid was not.
That story could have literally happened anywhere at all in the United States. It is a well-studied phenomenon that our jails contain mostly African-American and Hispanic young men. As this graph shows the percentage of arrests for Blacks and Hispanics is 60%, 24% more arrests than the percentage of Whites arrested. Even though, as the graph also indicates, Blacks and Hispanics only made up about 27% of the total population. There is definitely something going on here in how we perceive who is dangerous to us and society. There is a base psychological phenomenon going on that is vividly captured in the percentages of the incarcerated.
Source
At its core our prejudices are not about history or socioeconomic status, though those things do influence us, its about how we structure our society today to incentivize or dis-incentivize people from, all walks of life and racial backgrounds, interacting with each other in a normal and human way. We as humans are flawed beings and rely heavily on how we process the information that our sensory organs are gathering for us. How we process what our eyes, ears, hands, mouth and nose are telling us entirely depends on how we were taught to use them and how good at their particular part of information gathering they are to begin with.
There is no way to comprehend what you don’t know and have never experienced and it is even harder to un-learn ways of gathering information and interpreting it once you have learned a way that serves you well and leads you to success.
Where am I going with all of this? Not off into the clouds. I promise. I just mean to try and bring the conversation about race back to every person. It’s about every individual in our society understanding the importance of sympathizing, but not pitying, and respecting, but not kow-tow-ing to every other individual. That’s a very tall order, but we just need to make sure that we never loose sight of that goal; because once we do we will never accomplish it.
