Racial Biases In America

According to the Oxford dictionary, a stereotype is “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.” Racial biases and stereotypes are prevalent in the United States. They affect everyone and generally have a negative effect on how people are treated because of these prejudices. Stereotypes based on race or ethnicity impact people’s perceptions of others, affect how we treat each other, and inhibit racial equality.
Racial stereotypes greatly influence how people see another, typically in a negative way. Many people hold the belief that every Muslim person is a terrorist, every African-American person is a criminal, and every Hispanic person is lazy, among many more. These preconceived opinions cause people of these ethnicities to be unfairly judged based upon the color of their skin. According to a U.S. News article published in March of 2016, “America Has a Big Race Problem,” nearly 90% of Americans have a bias towards people of color.
We treat people in accordance with our perspective of them. If a black person shows even the slightest hint of malicious intent, they are regarded with suspicion and are “guilty until proven otherwise.” A white person doing the same thing wouldn’t raise any eyebrows or get a second glance from anyone. This is shown in the controversial Ferguson shooting in August of 2014, when an African-American teenager was shot and killed by a white police officer. In a study by Justin Nix, research showed that “civilians from ‘other’ minority groups were significantly more likely than whites to have not been attacking the officer(s) or other civilians and that black civilians were more than twice as likely as white civilians to have been unarmed.” So then why do black people automatically garner more suspicion than