Racial Profiling: A Social Construct of Prejudices

1. Racial profiling is a form of discrimination in which a person of authority acts against individuals because they are members of certain races or ethnicities. Rather than act on an individual’s behavior, law enforcement officers and government officials have prejudices against particular groups of people. They assume that individuals of a certain race or ethnicity are likely to participate in deviant and illegal activities. For this reason, African Americans drivers are more likely to be arrested than drivers of the white population; African Americans also are more predisposed of being suspects in a crime. In fact, on August 9, 2014 Officer Darren Wilson, a white officer, fired twelve shots at unarmed Michael Brown, a black man. Wilson confronted stopped Brown to confront him about stolen cigarillos, because Brown fit the description of the suspect. Many reports state that Brown was disarmed and rose his hand to surrender; however, Wilson’s distrust and prejudice against people of Brown’s race made him believe that Brown initiated an act of violence. Thus Wilson, assuming Brown was about to
The social construction of race is the process of how interactions between different individuals shape society’s overall understanding of race. In this process, individuals differentiate which qualities and characteristic, such as skin color, belong to different racial groups. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, race is a symbol that represents individual’s sense of identity. Interactionists believe that individuals of the dominant race in society initiate racism through interactions with each other by sharing prejudices about other races. These one-on-one interactions are the basis of society’s social construction of race. Interactionists believe in the contact hypothesis, which states that increasing interracial interactions will decrease prejudice and promote equality in our society. Inevitably, society’s perception of different races will