African American Discrimination

The political history of the USA has seen some of the biggest struggles to make the country open-minded towards the issues of race since the Civil War. For most Americans, present day America still remains segregated. Statistics have shown that the discrimination throughout history has been used in a direct behavior against African-American people. Discrimination is the overarching theme and factor in cases of education, the judicial system, and the media portrayal of the race. This paper will examine the continued discrimination exhibited in today’s world in relation to the plot of A Lesson Before Dying and how discrimination plays a vital role in the institutional decisions that majorly affect the African American race.

One of the biggest

‘In New York City, 80% of the NYPD stop checks were of blacks and Latinos’ (Quigley). It is more common for African Americans to be checked, by making them lay flat onto the ground, in comparison to any other group in the USA. The same was the biased practice indicated in A lesson Before Dying which is represented by the deputy’s regular checks on Grant for which he had to empty all his pockets as if was also a criminal whenever he visited Jefferson in the jail. Moreover, today the fear of police shooting has made African Americans parents so much afraid of the police that they train their children’s to not stir during a police check and to slowly access driving documents while the hands still raised up. Nevertheless African Americans form the biggest segment of the population killed during police checks and most of the time the person killed is unarmed highlighting the injustice resulting from a bias attitude of policemen against African Americans. ‘Therefore, the ferocious afro, the wearing of beads, teeth, fetish necklaces and the like always define a militant black radical. It is no matter that these outer camouflages for the black ego and devotion to retrospective glory are no more than a ghetto fashion. These are the stigmata of the enemy to the police’ (Wright). The 7:1 ratio of African Americans to white shot and killed by police that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s, clearly reflected racial

‘Median income among black Americans is roughly half that of white Americans. Applicants with Anglo-sounding names were 50% more likely to get calls for interviews than their black-sounding counterparts.’ (John Blake). Same goes with persons with prison records as white people with prison records are more likely to be called back following a job interview compared to people of color. A Lesson Before Dying also indirectly discusses this issue as Grant might be more educated than most of the white characters in the book, but the social morale dictates as he was only a school teacher at a ‘black school’. Therefore he cannot think of even entering the house of a white man from the front door, nor is expected to complain if he had to wait for a couple of hours to meet a white man. In the present world, discrimination which exists in our society due to so-called non-intentional bias is a clear indicator that race still plays an important role in our present