Critical Summary of Two Articles on Racial Profiling
Racial profiling has caught attention of the public with a number of incidents in recent years which have sparked public outrage in United States. The academic research on the subject has been going on for a while before, although it is expected to intensify now. The history of United States shows complicated interracial relations, while its neighbor Canada is seen as more progressive. Nonetheless, there is evidence that police in both countries engages in racial profiling when interacting with a public on the street. Two papers attempt to measure racial bias of the police force in Canada and US respectively. Paper dealing with Canada samples high school students and homeless adolescents, bringing demographic factors into analysis and producing some interesting findings. Meanwhile the US-based paper analyses the federal courts’ cases, which has a number of flaws in research design and incomplete information on a number of potentially important factors. Both papers suggest the presence of racial bias in the police forces of the countries, however the findings presented by the paper about Canadian youth presents more convincing findings. Nonetheless, the topic of racial profiling is of paramount importance due to the policy implications as well as major global developments impacting US and Canada, and therefore, cannot be ignored by social scientists.
United States has for a long time suffered from manifestations of racism of varying intensity. Its most extreme form, slavery, has existed for centuries. It has, however been outlawed with Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. As an outcome of the war, African Americans were freed from slavery, equalized in rights, including the right to vote. However, after a relatively short period of Reconstruction, southern states have adopted the so-called Jim Crow laws. On paper, these laws have been pursuing the doctrine “separate but equal”, but in reality they established segregation by race. Black people were forced into separate neighborhoods with poorer living conditions, overcrowded schools and hospitals and inadequate municipal services. Their right to vote was likewise limited by introducing literacy tests for those who wanted to exercise their right to vote. Since African Americans, albeit freed from slavery, most often had either none or very little formal education, they were very likely to fail the test.
Such poor state of affairs continued as long as into the 1950s. Most of the black population could read and write by then, therefore the registrars have invented more intricate ways to drive African Americans away from the voting booths. Normally, the literacy test included of writing down and reading a section of the Constitution, anyone who could do it is supposedly literate enough to vote. However, registrars had their own discretion in coming up with a test and determining the results. They used this right to turn the expectedly routine procedure into an unreasonably complicated questionnaire, asking information such as “which president served when and who had the ultimate power to adjourn Congress” (Rutenberg 2015). As a result, even the marginal …
