On Racism

For starters, I would like to argue against the chart that Daniel posted. It does give some basic information regarding racial hate crimes, but the real trend there is behind population. The highly populated states like New York, California and Michigan all have more people. California and New York in particular have very large cities and many more people. California has nearly ten times the population of Alabama, and Michigan is pretty well populated as well. It has about the same number of people as Georgia. I do agree with you that calling the entire South racist is a ridiculous claim.

As someone who isn't from the South, I feel I can offer a different perspective on racism. People I know and I would often mention the subject, but it was always in some sort of jest. I didn't come to Tech expecting everyone to have racist beliefs. In fact, I expected rather the opposite. I am not one to judge before I truly get to know someone, so I held myself to not believing anything about the subject, save for the common stereotypes. Stereotypes are most often incorrect, and I know this quite well.

That said, I do agree that as a general population, we believe racism is gone. I know this is false. There are two incidents in particular which I remember, one vaguely and the other rather vividly. The first was the murder of Amadou Diallo. Diallo was an immigrant from Guinea who came to New York City in 1996, and was there for three years after. He wanted to become a student, and was working on the streets to try and make that happen. He was stopped for looking like a wanted criminal. He obviously wasn't this person. There were four officers who stopped him as he was entering his house. The officers thought he was ignoring their orders to stop, and when he reached into his jacket, they shot at him an incredible forty one times. It was determined that he was reaching for his wallet, and the officers were later acquitted for murder charges. I don't remember much of the incident, as I was still young, but I do remember that it sparked large debates about racial profiling and such. There was much debate on the issue, and I can look back on it and decide for myself that the entire issue was based around race. The second incident I mentioned was the trial and conviction of Eric Frimpong. There is a good article on it here: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=4300383 (I know it's ESPN, but the facts are all good, even if it is clearly written with bias.) To put a long story short, Frimpong was charged with sexual assault on a weak case with little evidence, and more evidence suggesting that he did not do anything wrong than the other way around, yet was still sent to jail for six years. I remember this incident much better, and that the primary reason for his being sent to jail was the belief that he was a violent criminal, based on another "incident", which was literally just a statement. Again, racial profiling was present, but this time it was much less publicized. I believe this is because we are forgetting that racism does still exist in today's world. We have each provided certain incidents for or against the claim made below, but the bottom line is that these are often isolated incidents, and we have to look at the bigger picture.