Dear Future President:

Being elected into the most powerful position in the United States, you will have it extremely difficult, especially being elected when citizens of the our nation seem to be going against each other. There seems to be a lot of hate being spread around, a lot of it coming from the racial profiling, and the racism we still see today. It has been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, so I think we’d be past this.

As I am sure you know, many African American men find themselves in a predicament. They’re often being racially profiled, and some end up dead due to  a bad encounter with law enforcement. Police, and even the law tend to be more biased towards Caucasian people. For example, Brock Turner, a  Caucasian Stanford swimmer who raped a girl after a party.  Yet he was only sentenced to six months in jail because the judge thought it would ruin Brock’s mental well-being. While on the other hand, Cory Batey, a Black football player at Vanderbilt, raped a girl, but was sentenced to a mandatory, 15-25 years in prison. Both claimed to be intoxicated, and  said they had no recollection of the incident. Black men are usually the ones to get stricter sentences, usually   a 20% longer sentence, compared to white men who commit the exact same crime. Try and tell me that this is not about race.

I think people in law enforcement need to be held accountable and be more open minded. We can do this by having them take sociology courses, and learn more about the development of society. This would help them understand what people of different backgrounds have to go through. I believe that we need to take a bigger step toward stopping the constant stereotypes, and take a step forward, not backward. 

Audrey Hoang