Racial Discrimination In America

The way we view racial groups is greatly influenced by the events that involve or surround that race. If the event surrounding a race is negative, then our views of that race will also become negative, this is no different for Muslim Americans. In Ferguson’s article “Muslims in America”, it talks about how Americans despise and discriminate against Muslim Americans, they make all these assumptions about their background and religion and yet they don’t know a single thing about Muslims themselves. Sociologist C.Wright Mills introduces the idea that we are able to “grasp the connection between history and biography, he called it the sociological imagination (Henslin, 2014, p.2). What Mills is saying is that the area that we grew up and the events
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Before the events of 9/11 and the London Suicide Bombings, Americans had a very neutral view of Muslims, they didn’t despise them nor did they discriminate against them. The media rarely mentioned them and they were never suspected of committing any terrorist attacks. However after those events occurred, Muslims have become a scapegoat for America. Whenever something terrible happens like a shooting or bombing, people start to blame Muslims and groups like the Al Qaeda. In 2001, the year 9/11 happened, there was a 1,600 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes, and in 2005 and 2006, the number increased ten percent (Ferguson, 2012, p.519). While Americans have all these negative views of Muslims, they don’t know anything about them. According to Ferguson, “Muslims are diverse, well-integrated, and largely mainstream in their attitudes, values and behaviors (p.520). Ferguson also claims that Muslims are share the same political views as Americans. He says that like a majority of Americans, they oppose gay marriage, favor increased government spending to help the poor, and disapprove of President Bush’s performance (p.522). It’s clear that Muslims have assimilated nicely into
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In my family, racism was never a problem for us. It was something that my family never talked about, they didn’t have any prejudice views towards any race which is great. But for me, when I was growing up, because of the fact that they never talked about that stuff, nor did they teach me anything about it, I didn’t really know much about things like social inequality, discrimination etc. But the reason that I started to view Muslims in a negative way was because of my social location. Growing up in a middle class neighborhood and attending normal public schools, a lot of the kids that I spent my time with had shaped my views of Muslims. During recess and lunch breaks, a lot of non-Muslim kids would tease other Muslim kids by calling them a terrorist and saying things like “he’s going to put a bomb in the classroom” or “I don’t want to make you mad because I don’t want you blow me up”, basically a lot of bomb jokes. At first my friends and I didn’t join in on the teasing and I’m sure that there were other kids besides us who didn’t either, but when my friends started joining in on the teasing, I decided to join in as well. I only wanted to fit in with everyone else, I wanted to be socially integrated with the group. Before meeting these kids, I didn’t know too much about Muslims at the time, nor did I know much about 9/11 and the London Suicide Bombings except for the fact that a