There are many people in the United States that are against police profiling. Profiling is defined as “the use of specific characteristics, as race or age, to make generalizations about a person, as whether he or she may be engaged in illegal activity” according to dictionary.com. Police are defined as “an organized civil force for maintaining order, preventing and detecting crime, and enforcing the laws” according to dictionary.com. Combine these two definitions, and you can define police profiling as an organized civil force that maintains order and prevents crime by using specific characteristics to make generalizations about a person. Many people today are against police profiling because of what has happened in history. They associate police profiling with police corruption and brutality, as well as with racism. They look at what happened in big name cases such as the Rodney King beating, and associate police profiling with it. To combine these three separate definitions into one is not correct, as they are three separate things.
Since the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th, 2001, police profiling has turned into two separate parts – profiling minorities in communities, and profiling persons of Arab decent or followers of Islam in our airports. You will find many people in the Unit…
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…n-institute.org/html/_latimes-what_looks_like.htm>.
“Passenger who had Arabic flash cards sues over his detainment – CNN.com.” CNN.com – Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, Entertainment
A Message of Hope in Love Medicine
A Message of Hope in Love Medicine
Love Medicine, by Louis Eldridge attempts to confront the popular stereotypes of American Indians. The novel generally follows the history of a family of Chippewa Indians who live on and off a reservation.
In a thoroughly humanist approach, Ms. Eldrige narrates each chapter in a different voice, and through extremely varied characters effectively shows the diversity of the Indians. This is an important aspect of the novel, as it demonstrates that there is no single stereotypical “Indian”. The book begins with two scenes from a modern perspective, showing a turbulent family with fairly disturbing problems. Then the author flashes back to the lives of the Chippewa’s family two generations earlier, and moves more or less chronologically to the present day. One of the major conflicts in the story is the reconciliation of the Native Americans to their cultural past, while still embracing the future.
The words “Indian”, American Indian, or Native American, all bring to mind stereotypes of a race of people with specific stigma attached to themselves in modern American culture. The word “Indian” can conjure up a multiplicity of images, from the barbaric, blood-thirsty savages straight out of a western movie, to the more romantic image of a noble, intelligent, and tribal people, living in harmony with nature. These extremes in the modern stereotyping of the American Indian and all of their various moderations are wrong for a very important reason: They are rooted in the past.
The war between popular European culture and Indian culture was over practically before it had even begun. After the frontier closed around the turn of the century all that was left of untouched Indian culture …
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Lipsha then in his own words, “took an evil shortcut”. He purchased frozen turkey’s from a store and tried to have them blessed by Catholic priests. This represents the ways in which native Americans lean on the modern day conveniences of Western society. This not only makes their cultural power diminish, it turns the power completely back around on them. In Lipsha’s case, the medicine killed his grandfather.
The struggle of the native American people today, as illustrated in Love Medicine is one of cultural identity. The other problems of poverty, alcoholism, hate, and infidelity, are only symptoms of the “bad medicine”, which is made easy by the omnipresence of Western culture. The message of Love Medicine is one of hope for a people who have everything in the world to despair about, who suffer from a sickness which only one medicine will heal.