The streets in Ferguson were outraged with dissatisfaction after the court decided not to indict officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown. The decision has larger meaning than the death of an 18-year-old boy or the officer being found not guilty, the decision and reaction are focused around the ongoing racism in the United States.

The black community is protesting the inequality and injustice of the court system which systematically benefits white people instead of black. The racial discrimination is still an extremely prominent issue that needs to be resolved. It is not fair to say every person in the United States is racially biased, but to a certain degree most individuals are.

 According to dictionary.com, racism is defined as, “a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one’s own race is superior and has the right to rule others.” Economically, white people tend to hold a higher percentage of the upper class, that may be the reason for thoughts of superiority.

 An example can be seen in the following statement; in April of 2014, Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia said, “It’s very important to take a long view at what’s going on here. And I’ll be able to dig up some emails that make part of the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t look good, especially from people who have made up their mind that they don’t want it to work. Because they don’t like the president, maybe he’s of the wrong color. Something of that sort.” He added, “I’ve seen a lot of that and I know a lot of that to be true. It’s not something you’re meant to talk about in public, but it’s something I’m talking about in public because that is very true.” He is implying the Affordable Care Act is not being accepted due to the color of the President.

The media’s involvement has added to many issues in the past and is still contributing. On Nov. 30, five football players from the St. Louis Rams raised their hand in solidarity with the protesters upset from the Michael Brown verdict. According to U.S. Today, at least 70 departments scattered from Connecticut to California arrested black people, 10 times more often than people who are not black.

 Yale student Stephen Balkaran said, “Media has divided the working class and stereotyped young African-American males as gangsters or drug dealers. As a result of such treatment, the media has crushed youth’s prospects for future employment and advancement. The media has focused on the negative aspects of the black community, while maintaining the cycle of poverty that the elite wants.”

According to the U.S. Census in 2000, Stillwater’s population is 97.52 percent white citizens. Being in the majority can make it impossible for some to imagine the pressure the minority is currently facing.

Sally Kohn, a CNN political commentator said, “It’s not wrong to be white. Maybe a few people in America think so, but that’s it. What racial justice activists and those protesting in Ferguson do think is that it’s wrong to not scrutinize what race means in our society today — how implicit bias shapes everything from our neighborhoods to our economy to who gets to live and who gets to die when they’re doing nothing else but holding a toy. That’s what’s wrong. We don’t have a choice about which side of that equation we’re born on, but we do have a choice about whether we acknowledge the reality of bias and talk honestly — together — about solutions.”

 Some Americans have come to the conclusion that racism is no longer an issue, or at least not the issue.

An article from the New York Times by Orlando Patterson said, “Certainly, poor blacks are hurt by racial discrimination — mostly in biased police behavior and draconian drug-sentencing laws that result in horrendous incarceration rates for young men. But as the sociologist William Julius Wilson emphasized more than 19 years ago, race is of secondary importance when it comes to the economic conditions of poor blacks. Poor blacks, like poor whites, are impoverished partly because they attend bad schools, come from broken families and live in broken communities. But the basic problem is that the poor, no matter how hard they work, earn too little to pull themselves out of poverty.”

Current day racism needs to be acknowledged before it will get any better. Ignoring or denying the fact racism is still a prominent issue will only create larger room for racial discrimination to grow.