In modern humanistic society, discrimination on various grounds, including race, is unacceptable. However, even nowadays, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic face various difficulties due to their race. In particular, Blacks in America face systematic labor discrimination that affects women particularly hard (Weller, 2019). People of color also suffer the consequences of inherent disparities in the criminal justice system. The Sentencing Project (2018) reports that Blacks have a greater chance of being arrested, convicted, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white Americans. This aspect is associated with the presence in the United States of two separate criminal justice systems: “one for wealthy people and another for poor people and people of color” (The Sentencing Project, 2018, para. 3). This aspect also leads to racial profiling, which stems from the non-law-abiding bias of African Americans. Such a consequence strongly affects young people since they have a greater risk of going to prison compared to Whites, which would affect their entire future life and close most of their opportunities for them.
Although, at the present time, against the background of the growth of the fight against discrimination, more and more articles appear in various media about these problems, they are not discussed fairly. In particular, there are few materials related to these topics, and they are often prepared by interested groups. At the same time, media aimed at wider population groups often ignore these issues. This situation leads to the fact that discrimination remains exclusively a problem of members of racial minorities themselves, without raising unrest among the public.
The existence of discrimination against non-Whites in the United States is well illustrated by episodes of discrimination against Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this situation was widely publicized in the media, as it led to outbreaks of violence and hate-related crimes. At the same time, structural racism, which has a less visible but more profound impact on racial minorities, often goes unnoticed due to the lack of direct manifestations.
References
The Sentencing Project. (2018). Report to the United Nations on racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system. The Sentencing Project. Web.
Weller, C. E. (2019). African Americans face systematic obstacles to getting good jobs. CAP. Web.