Ever since the early 1600’s prejudice and discrimination has been a big factor in this country. This all was started by the transatlantic slave trade which was the mass migration of Africans to the Caribbean, Europe, South America and to North America. Africans from Africa’s west coast were piled on in ships to the western hemisphere and Europe. The first slaves were brought to the Jamestown settlement in 1619 from the western coast of Africa. These slaves were forced to do hard labor without pay for many centuries.
Ever since then, America and a majority of other countries in the world has had or maybe even still have problems with prejudice in the 21st century. Prejudice can occur between any race that is on this planet. Police brutality should be a bigger issue in this country because it is raising racial tensions, people are starting to riot, and innocent people are getting killed by senseless acts of violence (“Understanding Prejudice”). Prejudice is also now known more because of today’s media and their influence. Today, when you hear about something prejudice happening in the world, the news always goes farther than what the story actually was.
Back in the 1950’s and 60’s prejudice happened all the time, but people did not care because it was a part of society, even though it was still totally as wrong then as it is now. The media likes to blow it up now so that the news station can get more views, money etc. If they didn’t talk about it, they would be losing money and views that they could be earning. For example, the news aired the Trayvon Martin case live on Tv. Back twenty years ago you would’ve never heard of anything like that before (“Racial discrimination has diminished”). Since it involved a Caucasian man and a black teen the news had to air it for people’s attention.
At the same time, though people are now starting to come to the realization of how brutal prejudice is and that it should be stopped. The difference between the Ferguson Protests and crowds at a sporting event, is that usually crowds at sporting events are more peaceful and property usually does not get destroyed during the rallies/parades. In protests more government and personal properties gets damaged and that’s why the news media cover these outlets more than sports riots. For example, during the Baltimore Riots with Freddy Gray CNN covered the whole affair for a week straight nonstop.
This was because people were damaging property and starting fires etc. If it was a peaceful protests like it should have been then the general public would of not heard too much about the story because the media wouldn’t of covered the story as much as they would of liked. One thing the media didn’t cover was that during the Freddy Gray case, most of the police officers were black (“Video cameras curtail police brutality”) Not once did you hear stations like CNN or MSNBC mention this. This proves that no matter what race of police officers there are, you will always have some “bad” cops and the media does all this for money purposes.
Nowadays, when you try to address this issue to people they tend to feel uncomfortable. When it comes to police brutality we as people have to understand what a stereotype is also. A stereotype is when someone makes a quick judgment about someone without actually knowing them. A stereotype can be positive or negative towards an individual (“The Undergirding Factor is Power”). I. For example, if you say all asians are good at math, that would be a stereotype even though it’s positive towards the kid.
A negative stereotype would be all black teens are thugs. “Discrimination”) The media portrays these stereotypes against certain ethnic groups and when police officers hear this on the news, then their conscience is telling them all black teens are thugs. So when they’re out on duty and a confrontation happens with a black teen, then they automatically get that thought inside of their head because of what they heard by the media that morning. Police brutality and prejudice against minorities we as americans think is a thing of the past. In reality, it’s still a thing of today’s society even though people want to make us believe that it isn’t.
When it comes to the media, they can be good and bad but we can’t always trust them because of their lack of information on stories like the Freddy Gray story as one of many examples. It’s crazy to believe that our own media outlets try to fool their own people just so they can make a profit from us. Also, you have to watch out what you post on social media because as humans everyone can interpret sayings different ways, and it’s really easy for someone to mistaken what you actually meant and turn your saying into a negative meaning.
It’s important that as America being labeled “the greatest country” we have to fix these issues that are going on in our own backyards and not just in other third-world countries. We can fix these problems by having less social media devouring our lives and by having more knowledge on the actual event. People just can’t know half the story and then make a quick generalization about what’s going on, or even worse be biased and instantly hop on the police’s side or the teen who got shot side(“Discrimination & Stereotypes”). The playing field has to be even.