“Racism oppress its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit,” (King). There is a current issue of racism in America that is starting to be more spoken of. These problems affect relationships, perceptions and stereotypes, and the cost of living for black people. In Rebecca Skloot’s book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” she explains throughout the book about how Lacks was treated horrible because she was a black woman. Also, she talks about the treatments of other blacks as well. Rebecca Skloot is is the author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Her award winning science writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; Discover; and many other publications. She specializes in narrative science writing and has explored a wide range of topics, including goldfish surgery, tissue ownership rights, race and medicine, food politics, and packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. She has worked as a correspondent for WNYC’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW. She and her father, Floyd Skloot, co-edited The Best American Science Writing 2011. Skloot gives examples of how the scientists had a way of culturing the cells and not having to tell the patients. The cell culturing only became relevant because of the patient Henrietta Lacks the origin of the HeLa cells the worlds first self replicating “immortal” cells. This is the first real clear example of how the people of color were regularly discriminated against in the mid 1900’s. The treatments of black people on how they are ridiculed and harassed are in the story and still go on today.
Relationships develop by meeting other people and interacting with them, but when one group of people are victims of hatred form another group, the relationship between them will be tarnished. In Skloot's book she stated, “They recruited hundreds of African-American men with syphilis, then watched them die slow, painful, and preventable deaths, even after they realized penicillin could cure them,” (pg. 50). With the doctors doing this to these men, they created a feeling of hatred towards black men towards doctors. They did not feel as though they could trust them again, nor would they want help because they felt as though they won’t actually get any help. “The sad truth is that millions of African-Americans remain skeptical about government health programs and even private healthcare systems. I found the concerns of one DC postal worker especially poignant: "I feel like I'm an experiment," 27-year-old Darryl Jones told the Times” (Alexander). The interviewer Amy Alexander is an American journalist that has written four non-fiction books and has a BA in Magazine journalism but is a nationally recognized author. These problems are still happening even today where the blacks feel as though they are pitted against and will not receive help. “Also uncovered was the possibility that the government's slow response in protecting and treating the postal workers is feeding into longstanding fears held by many blacks about the government's healthcare services,” (Alexander). Why would black people feel as though they can receive help of all they’ve gotten was half-assed attempts or no help at all?
Being black in America means you get watched while walking through a store, or getting stopped by police because you are walking through a nice neighborhood. “No less an authority than the US justice department tells us that a black man in 2007 is three times more likely to be sent to prison than a white man; half the country's prison population is black, and one in three black men in their thirties has a prison record. A black person is three times more likely to have his or her car searched than a white one, and black people are meted out prison sentences 20 per cent longer on average than those their white peers receive for identical crimes. Whites use illegal drugs more than blacks, but blacks are still 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs offences” (Stephen). Stephen Andrew is a Canadian-British journalist born in Watford, England and is best known for his work as a television news reporter and anchor. Andrew also works as a radio talk show host. People perceive black people as though they are beneath them. They don’t necessarily think that they hate black people, but they sub-concisely think that they are above/more privilege then them. “How do these perceptions match up to reality? While it's hard to say exactly how much discrimination exists in each part of society in the Pew Research survey, there's strong evidence of disparate treatment across several sectors. In the criminal justice system, black marijuana users are far more likely to be arrested than white marijuana users, despite modest differences in usage rates. As sociologists Devah Pager who is an American sociologist best known for her research on racial discrimination in employment and the American criminal justice system. She is currently Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Harvard University and Hana Shepherd who was a professor at Princeton and is now currently a professor at Rutgers university summarized in 2008, evidence of discrimination against blacks persists in a wide variety of settings. Blacks tend to pay more than whites for fast food (controlling for other factors) and when buying cars and receive fewer callbacks when applying for jobs” (Tankersley, Craighill, Clement). Some reasons people continue to think this way is due to media because they spew out titles saying ‘black man killed white neighbor’ ‘black man attacks white woman’ ‘black man robs a convenience store.’ Media outlets thrive off of bad news because it gives them more clicks and views. The more views of bad news/hatred the more people have perceptions of certain people’s behaviors and attitudes and then creates stereotypes. Unfortunately, media bias parallels extensive research that shows how African Americans are far more criminalized than their white counterparts, nationwide. One study about “who looks criminal” determined that police officers frequently associate black faces with criminal behavior. According to a 2010 survey, white people overestimated African Americans’ participation in burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime by 20–30 percent. Additionally, white people support stricter criminal justice policies if they think that more black people are arrested as a result” (Townes). She received a B.A. in political science from UCLA, where she also minored in cultural anthropology. In Skloot’s book she explained, how the blacks and whites were segregated in the hospital, and how the blacks had the shittier doctors. This is showing another perception that whites are superior then blacks, so they deserve worse treatments then they do.
Some people believe racism is not a problem anymore. They believe that the world has started to accept different walks of life. One example, is that there is less discrimination throughout a black person’s lifetime, then there once was in the past. “They asked more than 14,000 Americans how often they had been discriminated against, and why. The answers were surprising. A majority of respondents – even blacks – reported experiencing little to no discrimination in their lifetimes… As everyday racism declines, we have invented "structural" and "systemic" racism to replace it – all the more insidious, because it is invisible” (Wente).
Wente is an American-born Canadian columnist for Canada's largest national daily newspaper, The Globe and Mail, and a director of the Energy Probe Research Foundation. She received the National Newspaper Award for column-writing in 2000 and 2001. In 2012, Wente was found to have plagiarized on a number of occasions. She was suspended from writing her column, but later reinstated. However, in 2016, she was found to have failed to meet her newspaper's attribution standards in two more columns. Another, example is people think that minorities have longer sentencing for the same crime as a white person, but that is not the case with this report: “A report published in 2012 by the U.S. Commission on Sentencing found that prison sentences for black men were, on average, almost 20 percent longer than those for white men for similar crimes; and the Commission had documented previously that blacks were more likely than whites to be charged with crimes that had mandatory minimum sentences. But the Commission warned against interpreting the numbers as evidence of racial discrimination. In a working paper released in 2012, law professor Sonja Starr and economics professor Marit Rehavi studied a sample of 58,000 federal cases, including property crimes, violent crimes, and weapons and regulatory offenses. They found that 83 percent of the sentencing disparity between blacks and whites could be explained by differences in criminal record, the arrest offense, gender, age, and location. The disparity that remained was a result of charging differences. Starr and Rehavi say there is no indication that disparate charging is a result of racial discrimination; there are, they note, other relevant factors that might not appear in the data” (Tuttle). Tuttle is a regular contributor to both the online and print editions of National Review. His work has been published in The New Criterion, First Things, Intercollegiate Review, and The Imaginative Conservative, and he has appeared on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor and On the Record w/Greta Van Susteren, PBS News Hour, and The Glenn Beck Program, among others. Ian graduated from St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD) in May 2014 with a degree in Liberal Arts.
Do you want to know what a few things black people have to deal with on a day to day basis? They deal day to day harassment verbally and physically, this is only getting worse in the recent years. I’ve personally witnessed this with my fiancé, people have harassed her by calling her out by being the only black girl in a store and also, they movies a group of boys verbally attacked her while she was walking up to meet me. The forms of racism have fluctuated throughout the years but lately has been almost as bad as the 60’s with recent lynching, KKK rallies, and people attacking on another due to high racial tensions. For example, “James Harris Jackson, a white supremacist and Army veteran from Baltimore, went to New York in March to "target male blacks," according to police. They also say Jackson told them that he wrote a manifesto of hate. He was particularly irked by black men who dated white women,” (Capehart). Jonathan T. Capehart is an American journalist and television personality. He writes for The Washington Post's Post Partisan blog and is a contributor for MSNBC. He went to Carleton College and has won the Pulitzer prize. Even though there have been high racial tensions, whites, blacks, Asians, and more have been fighting back on protecting one another. “Now, a burst of new films, many of them documentaries, are taking a deep look beyond the headlines at the lasting impact that racial schisms and racism have on Americans’ everyday lives” (Buckley). Ms. Buckley studied politics at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and earned a master’s degree at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, studying human rights and journalism. Born in Dublin, she grew up in Ireland and Canada, and lives in Brooklyn. They are trying to show that every race should be equal, that racism should end, and they won’t be victims of it anymore. They deserve to live in a safe place where they won’t be afraid to walk the streets or be harassed.
In conclusion, I went over how racism affects relationships, perception and stereotypes, and the cost of living for black people. I also tied in how Skloot’s story tied into racism. All these aspects can be changed, if we put ourselves in their shoes. We need to ingest what they are telling us about how they are wrongly treated, instead of ignoring their pleas. This topic relates to because I see these things happen to my fiancé and grandpa. They both have been attacked in front of me and I see the hurt and anger in their eyes, so I want change in America, so they can live in peace.