Free Race And Social Policy Essay Example

Alexander talks about race, ethnicity and social justice following the racial discriminations after the Civil Rights Movements. African-Americans were subjected to mass incarcerations which were done to control racism. The same racial disparity operates in the criminal justice system. The police investigated their cases on basis of race as blacks were constantly stopped and grilled on their names and documents. The blacks were unnecessarily convicted of drug abuse and the US that time recorded the highest rates of mass incarceration. The problem was that the large number of the imprisoned were racial or ethnic minorities. All races used drugs but the blacks were the most convicted as a measure of controlling the population of the blacks and the minorities. The most indispensable aim of the prison system should be rehabilitation of the criminals as well as educating them to become better citizens in future who can contribute to the development of the nation. Much of the budget went to the construction or expansion of prisons, costs that could be incurred somewhere else. The criminal justice system was marred with racial discrepancies. It had created a means of funneling the youths to the jail systems. Most youths of color were expelled from school and arrested to serve jail terms in the prison in that manner denying them the right to education. The dependents of the prisoners who faced disenfranchisement and insecurity suffered greatly as majority were from ethnic and racial minorities.
The American slaves were subjected to cruel medical experiments such as electric shocks, amputations and brain surgery. Doctors performed these experiments without sterilizing their tools and without using pain relief aesthetics. These resulted to other outgrowths in the areas of surgery such as around the head. Scholars and physicians used slaves as body samples of dissections. Women from the slaves developed complications from the surgeries performed on them with unsterilized tools. Surgical techniques like the application of ether as anesthesia were first tried to the slaves before being standardized for the general public. Physical restraints were common and the slaves did not give consent to the experiments done to them. They bolted in pain from the experiments performed on them. Graves of the slaves were robbed and doctors poisoned patients in order to dissect them without sterilization. The surgeons asserted that the pain was no enough to justify the trouble that the victim could contract upon ignorance. Some of the slaves could be subjected to over 30 operations and had no chance to object. The doctors stated that anesthetics had not been proved to be used but the slave subjects will be used to test it. Men were chemically castrated or electroshocked in the claims of curing homosexual conditions in them. They were even forced to be sexually reassigned without provisions of hormones that can maintain their new sex.
Sterilization in many states is allowed on eugenic grounds as many claim that it is suitable for the socially inadequate like the deaf, blind, insane diseased, epileptic, deformed, or the orphaned. In America, involuntary sterilization is common in order to relieve the burden of tax on their facilities. Sterilization laws are also passed to shield the physicians involved in the sterilizing operations from lawsuits. Heredity plays a critical role in the transmission of undesirable characteristics and their reproduction is termed to be a menace to the society. This is done to cleanse races. Repeated criminals are also sterilized but this is not fairly inferred as a five-time chicken thief may be sterilized but a multi-billionaire embezzler wont. The mentally ill continue to be sterilized in many countries to avoid replication of their traits in the future generations. This to me is another form of genocide and is marred with racist elements as eugenics was a movement that reacted to European immigration.