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Over the last week I have been paying close attention to posts about discrimination and racial profiling that appear on my news feed. Without doubt, there were many things that showed up. It varied from news clips to songs, from pictures to poems, with the end message being racial discrimination.


Racial discrimination, hmm that got me thinking ."Is racial discrimination a subset of racial profiling? Are they the same thing? What is the difference?" the more I thought about it I came to the conclusion that their needs to be existing bias towards a group of individuals in order for the discrimination to be justified. People need to be labeled as "other" and different before any discrimination or assumptions can be made about an individual or a group of individuals. Before I go any further I want to explain my thought process of how I arrived at this conclusion.

I took my own opinions as tried to remember step by step how it is that I make an assumption about someone I do not know. First thing taken into account is the initial interaction or the first impression. I observe how the person is dressed, if they look clean and body language. After that very first observation there are many things that I could have assumed from that person. I could have assumed their gender, ethnicity, character, class and so on. Second is what I decided to do with that acquired information from the first impression. At this point, I can take into consideration any previous encounters of people that I have met or seen in order to formulate my perception of the individual and how I should act. If I only had bad experiences with such individual and that is all I know then, my first thought would be that this individual in front of me is the same as the others in his group. Therefore, it will be another bad experience and vice versa. Furthermore, if you have certain perceptions, especially if they are negative, about a group of individuals you will probably discriminate against that group of people. Thus, profile that group of individuals as having the same characteristics as the others.

One of the videos that I came across while scrolling through my news feed was, of a judge discussing the case of a black male that was stopped over a minor traffic offense and beaten. She states that if Mr. Dent (the black male that was stopped) conduct were indicative of his thought he would have thought, “What crime did I commit? Being a black in a Cadillac stopped for a minor traffic offense by a group of racists police officers" (link to video https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10154021995817994&id=363658042993)
This video is racial profiling looks like. The fact that Mr. Dent was stopped and detained simply because he was black. This case is nothing new. I have heard similar stories before and the fact that something like this is expected is scary. It is scary because you are accused of being criminal not because you have committed a crime but because you are not white. 
Like I mentioned stories like these are not uncommon and it is the sad truth, and I don't doubt that I will come across more stories like this as I continue my project. This following video is one that I had seen before. 

 This clip adds humor to the topic but none the less it is important because it reflects what it is like for a black male to be driving. Also, it shows how the police officer assumed that there were drugs involved because he was African American. Probably assuming that the girls were in the car against their will, the officer goes as far as to ask if the girls were okay.

Side notes: The pictures in this post are memes that appeared when I went to google and typed "racial profiling memes". I thought it would be appropriate for this post because memes are often posted on Facebook and other social media outlets. I was thinking about Goffman as I was trying to figure out what I thought about racial profiling and racial discrimination.  Also, I know my thoughts are a little scrambled right now as I am trying to make sense of it in my own ideas, but I hope that by the end of this project I will have more solidified and clear thoughts.
**When thinking about interactions I thought about Symbolic Interaction and the first impression. We asses people based on what we have encountered before. Whether it has been a personal interaction or a preconceived idea we will act according to what we know. It also reminded me of his idea that there is no true self because we are always acting based on who we are performing for (who we are interacting with) For example, we act on way with out friends and an other with out professors or parents. This fits into my post because in thinking about how people profile people I had to first think about how people interact with each other. I had to think about what people do depending on who the person is. It was very helpful to think about Goffman's theory in order to go step by step of how an interaction or first impression would occur.