Racial Profiling of Blacks by Police

“‘Racial Profiling’ refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.” (ACLU). Racial Profiling is a common occurrence in our culture. Most people don’t even realize that they are racial profiling because frequently in our society, people use race as grounds for assuming someone committed an offense. A study conducted at Northeastern university found that, “… 74.7 percent of speeders were White, while 17.5 percent were Black. In contrast, according to MSP data, Blacks constituted 79.2 percent of the drivers searched…” (Ramirez, McDevitt, & Farrell, n.d.). The high levels of disproportion in Black speeders to car searches shows how frequently racial profiling happens in our day to day lives.Trayvon Martin was a victim of racial profiling and neither supporters of Martin nor Zimmerman could deny that. In fact, Democrats saw such blatant racial profiling that their Racial Profiling Bill got another chance of being passed. John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan said, “Though the death of Trayvon Martin was not the result of a law enforcement encounter, the issues of race and reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct are so closely linked in the minds of the public that his death cannot be separated from the law enforcement profiling debate…” (Fox).

In a speech given in support of Trayvon Martin, President Barack Obama spoke about his own personal experiences with Racial Profiling and how the story behind Trayvon’s death hits home because it easily could’ve been him. This is the full video of Obama speaking about Trayvon Martin and race in America . The mentality of “this could’ve been me” that Pr...

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... Ramirez, McDevitt, & Farrell. "A Resource Guide on Racial Profiling Data Collection Systems" November 2000 https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bja/184768.pdf Tia Tyree (2011) African American Stereotypes in Reality Television, Howard Journal of Communications, 22:4, 394-413, DOI: 10.1080/10646175.2011.617217