Discrimination Against African Americans

Since the beginning of the history of the United States of America, colored people have always been persecuted and seen as beast-like beings due to the superiority whites feel they need to impose on others to make themselves seem greater than they are upon encountering different groups of people. Starting with Native tribes the first colonizers encountered when they came to the new land, they immediately described them as beasts and used them for their own advantage. Following Native Americans, during the seventeenth century when the Atlantic Slave really began to take off in America and slaves were the primary economic entity in the South, whites capitalized off of the blacks that survived the boat ride. Since the ending of the system and …show more content…
You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did”(13th). This quote came from John Ehrlichman recently when discussing the way Nixon had chosen to secure his spot as the president of the United States. The Nixon era pushed for the war on drugs and the criminalization of anyone with any ties to drugs and then with Reagan furthering the war on drugs and mandating mandatory minimum sentencing for crimes really is one of the biggest factors that caused such an inflammation in the amount of people held in prisons today. Such racially motivated laws make it easy to see the way in which blacks and latinos are continually countered from being able to excel and find ways to better their communities and lives overall in …show more content…
This has more effects than just on the surface. When one in four people in America are incarcerated we must step back and see how it reflects back on society. Each inmate has a family which means they are not the only ones solely being affected by the mass incarceration that seems to take place here in the United States. These men have mothers who have to watch their babies grow up too fast in these urban cities and suffer under a system that aims to punish them simply because of the color of their skin and the location of their homes. With older men being locked up, it makes it easy for people to stereotype black fathers as deadbeat dads because they are not around to provide and help raise their own children. This is also harmful for the children of these inmates and people who live in poor communities with high arrest rates because seeing all of the males in their life serve time and the relationship they see the police has with the members of their community, going to jail or prison doesn’t seem so bad. In a sense yes, they know and understand that prison is not a place that they want to be but it can also sometimes be seen as a rite of passage, a sort of mentality that one is not a “real man” until they’ve

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