African American Studies Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

African American Studies - Research Paper Example From the political standpoint, it is interesting to note how the criminal justice system across most societies is deliberately organized against African Americans. African Americans in the USA have faced racial discrimination in the courthouses and by the laws that have been passed by the state; also, since the Jim Crow Laws had been passed since the 1900s, the African Americans were segregated from the rest of the population, and denied equality in many areas of social life such as voting (Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System ,page 66). Also, even though African Americans make up 13% of the population in the USA, in 2004 African Americans were accused of "47.2% of murders, 53.3% of robberies, 31.9% of rapes, and 32.7% of assaults," (Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System, page 67); as we can see, this seems to be a skewed and disproportionate report, one that demonstrates racial discrimination against the African Americans. Following the "Rodney King" c ase, it was found that there does seem to be racial prejudice and bias being practiced against the African Americans, seen from the use of excessive violence, verbal harassment and invasive actions against them by police officers, (Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System, page 67). Moving onto historic examples of discrimination against African Americans, it would be worthwhile to mention the incident of the Red Summer of 1919, in which African Americans and the white population of Chicago launched into racially charged riots that lasted for 5 days; many African Americans were lynched, shot, wounded. The most significant reason for these racial riots was due to the feeling of intolerance and xenophobia towards the African Americans (Norvell & Tuttle , page 210). There was also a general feeling amongst the white population to push the African Americans back to the "bottom rung of the