Even though racism and practices of racial discrimination had been banned in the 1960s after the mass protests and the changes to the laws that banned racial discrimination institutionally. The society has made progress towards ensuring that there is no discrimination against people based on the color of their skin. However, there are still instances of racism today that point to the important cultural and perception problems that have to be addressed. Even though racism has been banned institutionally since the 1960s, America today still suffers from cases of racial discrimination.
Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, America was a segregated country with separate spaces dedicated to people with white and black skin. According to Delvin (2021), there are still beliefs and unconscious biases against the back Americans affecting society today. For example, the author refers to research showing that white people tend to move to different neighborhoods or newly built suburbs if their current residency area’s inhabitants are people of color. According to Delvin (2021), “when a neighborhood becomes 20 percent people of color, white people move away” (para. 5). This affects the public school’s funding, which is derived from property tax and results in poorer education for people of color. Hence, the system of school funding is flawed because it does not allow the people of color residing in underprivileged communities to get a good and quality education.
The underlying issues with the legal and tax system that affect the funding of the public schools lead to the so-called “school to prison pipeline.” This is a phenomenon Delvin (2021) uses to describe the children of color who engage in crime early on in their lives because of their environment and inability to get proper education that would provide them with a decent job in the future. Hence, these children engage in crime and often go to prison, unable to change their lives for the better. Delvin (2021) notes that statistically, the predominant majority of people in prisons or juvenile detention centers have low reading skills and are school dropouts. This shows an institutional problem that persists to exist in modern-day America since people of color who were born in underprivileged communities do not get a chance to receive a good education and escape the road leading them to prison.
The biases and barriers for the black people exist not only within the education system but with other state-led agencies as well. For example, black people are often arrested and incarcerated for crimes that other races do not get prosecuted for, such as drug possession (Devin, 2021). These statistics take into consideration the number of possession cases and the action that the justice system agents take. These nonviolent offenses lead to a circle of imprisonment, crime, and poverty for the black population. Moreover, this bias seems to be implicit since, with these offenses, people of all races should be treated equally, but black people are more often prosecuted.
In summary, this paper examines the racism that continues to exist in modern-day America. Although the Civil Rights Movement has had an effect on the legal system and the ban of segregation practices, some implicit biases against black people persist. For example, black people typically go to publically funded schools, which generally provide a poorer quality of education. Moreover, the people of this race are more often prosecuted for nonviolent crimes, as opposed to other races.
Reference
Delvin, E. (2021). ‘Racism in America’ tackles problems of today. Web.