Racial Cast Essay

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The US has a long history of oppression. Throughout time, the US has implemented many systems in which its residents have suffered through slavery, genocide, imprisonment, and segregation among several forms of oppression. As, defined by Lauren Anderson a racial cast is, “Having your social, economic, and political position determined by identity or birth”. In the history of black people in America racial cast have had a strong presence. Black people were enslaved for over two hundred and forty years, which meant that they had no governance over their lives or their children’s lives, they could not have access to education, they were restricted in their rights to expression and religion, and had no rights to ownership because they were property …show more content…

Looking back in history it is ever-present, “public housing was usually built in already impoverished black neighborhoods or marginal land, such as garbage dumps or toxic wetlands. ” Not only where politicians making these decisions but when blacks could afford to rise above the system they where met with many limitations, “Housing discrimination was based on the same premise of black incapacity, and thus reinforced ideas of black inferiority. ” These housing issues in connection to the mass incarceration element play a role in the racial cast system in that that they entrapped people in concentrated areas where it is easier to target people and get away with it due to their having fewer means and than white people and our outside the sight of the public and people in power through segregation. More over, Alexander states, “As one former prosecutor put it, “It’s a lot easier to go out to the ‘hood, so to speak, and pick somebody than to put your resources in an undercover (operation in a) community where there are potentially politically powerful people.” Alexander says with the support in this argument, how and why police specifically target and police black neighborhoods more strictly, because in essence, it is easier and drugs are less concealed due to small living quarters. Hence the emphasis that, if neighborhoods where not segregated but mixed the police would not feel they had the right to target people and treat them in the ways they do towards

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