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As a person of color herself, Morrison felt especially connected and emotional whilst reading Huckleberry Finn. The book shows a realistic scenario of the ways black people were treated as slaves. Her reaction of shock and fear is quite common when reading the book, it deals with many tough subjects and situations that African Americans were forced into by society. Just like the N-word video, Morrison and others were appalled by the reactions of people on the issue with race, and quite frankly, they were angry. The book provides insight in the harsh realities of the 1800s, which is hard for many people whose ancestors were slaves, subject to the pain and torture of their masters.

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In today's culture, the n-word has become used in day to day conversations, by every race. Many people think that it has become normalized, that it is just another way to say "dude". They don't think of it as an offensive, racist, hateful term simply because of how widely used it is today. People today, especially the younger generations, do not know the history of the word, and therefore feel comfortable using it. But how many people would use it if they realized that the word came from deep pain and suffering of the African Americans that were enslaved by white people. Music has also been a factor in the frequent use- especially rap music. If people use it freely in music, is it okay to speak it freely? Some think that the n-word has been taken back by the African American community, but will the negative connotations associated with the history of the word ever truly go away?

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When police officers in New York stop 700,000 people a year, 84% being black or Latino, there is a problem with racial profiling in America. During the time period of Huckleberry Finn, African Americans were often stopped by police, accused of crimes they had no connection with, arrested with no probable cause, and even thrown in jail with no evidence. While those extremes are not seen today in America, racial discrimination is still evident. Law enforcement is still more likely to stop someone of color than a white person. In other aspects, racism has been steadily declining- schools and companies are seeking minority applicants and make efforts to lessen unemployment gap between blacks and white. For underclass African Americans, this seems to not apply to them; they are stuck, unable to climb the "social ladder". Many of them continue to struggle to find jobs, get food on the table, and they are still subject to racism and discrimination. This facet of America today is most relatable to the life of Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Jim was a slave, therefore the lowest class on the social scale, and was treated disrespectfully, did not get proper nutrition, no schooling, unable to fix his life because of extreme racism that was apparent in the 1800s.

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The discrimination of African Americans in has been an issue since before the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. According to a study, 92% of African Americans felt there is discrimination against there race. If compared to the experiences and treatment of blacks in the time of Huckleberry Finn, the difference is obviously astronomical, yet there is still a lot of room for improvement. 2 out of 3 African Americans are subjected to racial slurs in their day to day life, more often in white prominent areas, less often in black prominent areas. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim was subject to hatred and abuse by most white people he encountered, that was the norm for the time period, but while Jim was surrounded by people of his own color (other slaves), there was no discrimination among them, only a like-mindedness and a common goal of freedom. While black people in America have improved ways of life since the 1800s, discrimination is still apparent in their day to day life, though not as extreme and as seemingly apparent as before.

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One of the paradoxes of racial discrimination is the way it can remain obscured even to the people to whom it's happening. Here's an example: In an ambitious, novel study conducted by the Urban Institute a few years ago, researchers sent actors with similar financial credentials to the same real estate or rental offices to ask about buying or renting a home or apartment. In the end, no matter where they were sent, the actors of color were shown fewer homes and offered fewer discounts on rent or mortgages than those who were white.

The results even surprised some of the actors of color; they felt they had been treated politely - even warmly - by the very real estate agents who told them they had no properties available to show them but who then told the white actors something different. The full scope of the disparate treatment often becomes clear only in the aggregate, once the camera zooms out.

And yet obscured as the picture may be, black Americans take the existence of discrimination as a fact of life. That's according to a new study conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which asked black respondents how they felt about discrimination in their lives and in American society more broadly.

Almost all of the black people who responded - 92 percent - said they felt that discrimination against African-Americans exists in America today. At least half said they had personally experienced racial discrimination in being paid equally or promoted at work, when they applied for jobs or in their encounters with police.

But within that near-consensus, the respondents reported having different kinds of experiences with discrimination, which varied considerably depending on things like gender, age and where they lived.

Take, for example, the question of whether discrimination that was the result of individual bias was a bigger problem than discrimination embedded into laws and government. Among the folks who said that discrimination existed, exactly half of all respondents felt the discrimination that black people face from individual people was a bigger cause for concern. But younger people were more likely to say they felt that institutional discrimination was a bigger concern.

There was also a city-rural divide here, with people who lived in urban areas more likely to see this discrimination as driven by institutional factors as opposed to individual bias than those who lived in rural areas.

How black people saw their neighborhoods

The data from the survey show that black people who reported living in mostly black neighborhoods viewed their communities differently than those who lived in mostly non-black areas. For starters, they were much more likely to describe their community as a low-income neighborhood. And they had more negative views about their neighborhoods, too: Those respondents were more likely to say that crime, housing, the availability of jobs and grocery stores were worse than they were in other places. They were about twice as likely as black folks who lived in mostly non-black neighborhoods to say their local schools were worse off than other places to live. They were also more likely to say the police force in their communities were of a different racial background.

Personal experiences with discrimination

There were some stark differences in the way people in different income brackets said they experienced discrimination. Just about 2 in 3 people who earned more than $75,000 a year said that someone has referred to them or black people with racial slurs; less than half of all people who made less than $25,000 said the same. The same trend was true when respondents were asked whether someone acted afraid of them because of their race: Fifty-five percent of people who made more than $75,000 a year or more said this was true, compared with 33 percent of those who made less than $25,000 a year.

The researchers did not attempt to posit any theories to explain why respondents answered differently based on their incomes. But what could be happening is that higher-income earners might live somewhat less segregated lives and have more chances to have more cross-racial encounters - and more negative cross-racial encounters.

I ran this theory by Phillip Atiba Goff at John Jay College, whose specialty is the psychology of bias and racism. Goff was wary of speculating on statistics from a survey that he didn't conduct, but he offered this useful bit of context that he called "the bind of black success": Not only were higher-income black folks in more contact with white people, but they also more acutely experienced the stakes of being direct competition with them. "The more proximity to inclusion is realistic, the price of exclusion is more pronounced," he explained.

Policing and criminal justice

At least half of the respondents said they had experienced discrimination or unfair stops or treatment by the police. Gender mattered here: Men were more likely than women to say that they had personally experienced discrimination in encounters with the police.

Age mattered, too: Younger people were much more likely than people 65 or older to say that they or a family member had been unfairly stopped or treated by the police because they were black.

But where people lived mattered a lot in people's feelings about policing. Suburbanites were much more likely to say they were treated unfairly than people in urban areas, and people in the Midwest and the South were much more likely than those in the Northeast to say that they or people in their communities experienced discrimination in dealing with the police.

So what might explain the variation in feeling between suburbanites and city dwellers when it came to policing? The most common reason for contact with police is a traffic stop, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, so it could mean that black people who live in places where cars are more central to everyday life - people who live in the suburbs and not in denser, "pre-car" cities like those in the Northeast - are simply stopped by the police more often.

Not surprisingly, the expectation of discrimination from the police also led many of the people surveyed - about 3 in 10 - to say they avoided calling the police when they were in need. (Low-income respondents were more than twice as likely to say they avoided calling the police.) That finding dovetails with recent research that found that high-profile local instances of police violence - and the subsequent erosion of trust in the police - makes people less likely to call 911.

Taken altogether, these survey results aren't terribly surprising: They're backed up by the reams of data that show the extent to which African-Americans are far more likely to live in areas with concentrated poverty even when they are high earners, are more likely to go to segregated and underfunded schools, and more likely to be stopped by the police and searched once they are. Black folks are living objectively more difficult lives than similarly situated white folks.

But here is a sobering thought: What if the black respondents to the NPR survey, who almost unanimously assumed that anti-black discrimination was a given, were like the people in the Urban Institute study and actually underestimating the drag that discrimination exerts on their lives? As data becomes more accessible and granular, we can more easily see how race is often the only variable that explains disparate treatment. If these responses are how people feel about discrimination based largely on what they can glean from their own direct experiences and commiserating with relatives and neighbors, it's not hard to imagine that the full picture is even less rosy than these data suggest at first glance.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

People of all races in the United States see racial discrimination regularly, but black Americans report it at the highest rates. This is according to a new survey from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch team has been reporting on this data, and he spoke to our co-host Rachel Martin about this statistic. Ninety-two percent of African-Americans surveyed say they have felt discrimination themselves or they've seen it happen to others like them.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: So that statistic - in some ways, that's not really that surprising, right?

GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: No, not surprising at all.

MARTIN: What's your take on this?

DEMBY: Well, you can see discrimination against African-Americans everywhere. It's backed up by the data. You can see it in housing and policing. Black people, for example, live in areas with more concentrated poverty, even when they are higher earners. Black Americans are more likely to go to segregated and underfunded schools, more likely to be stopped by the police and more likely to be searched once they are stopped.

MARTIN: So their responses to the survey are - they're a reflection of that reality that they're living.

DEMBY: That's right.

MARTIN: There are, though, some really interesting details in the data. What did you find?

DEMBY: Yeah. Within that 92 percent, which is near unanimous, there's a range of experiences. First of all, where you lived mattered in how you answer these questions. People who lived in cities were more likely to see discrimination as driven by institutional factors like policy and laws as opposed to, like, individual bias and racism. Gender matters here a lot, too. Men were more likely than women to say that they'd personally experienced discrimination in encounters with the police. And on policing, younger people were more likely to say that they or a family member had been unfairly stopped by the police because they were black. People who live in the suburbs and people who lived in the South and Midwest, interestingly, were more likely to report that people in their communities were discriminated against by the police.

MARTIN: Why would that be the case, thinking about the difference in policing in the perception of that between suburbanites and city-dwellers? I mean, what do you make of that?

DEMBY: Yeah, it made our antenna twitch, too. And one of the things that could explain what's going on here is cars. Right? So...

MARTIN: Cars.

DEMBY: The most common reason that anyone has contact with the police is by a traffic stop, right?

MARTIN: Traffic stops, yeah.

DEMBY: And that's according to the BJS, the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So it could just mean that black people who live in places where cars are more essential to everyday life are just having more contact with the police than people who live in denser, pre-car cities like the Northeast.

MARTIN: So you wrote about this for Code Switch. And you said that the survey results might actually be underestimating discrimination in some way. How so?

DEMBY: Yeah, yeah. So this study is about perceptions of discrimination. And one of the things that we've seen in other studies is that there are so many ways that, when discrimination happens to you, it's often invisible. Like, it's hard to see up close. Even when you're, like, in it or even when this - you're having...

MARTIN: Even if you're the one who's being discriminated against.

DEMBY: Absolutely. One great example of this is this study by the Urban Institute that came out a few years ago. What they did is they took testers - they were actors - and they sent them to real estate offices and rental offices to inquire about homes or renting apartments.

MARTIN: Yeah.

DEMBY: Some of them were white. Some of them were people of color. And what they found, no matter where they sent these testers, was that, routinely, the people of color were being shown fewer homes and were less likely to get discounts on their rent. But what was extra interesting about this was that many of those actors said that they were treated politely, even warmly, by the same people they found out later...

MARTIN: Oh, fascinating.

DEMBY: ...Were telling them that there weren't apartments available.

MARTIN: So maybe the endgame of the interaction was that you didn't get the apartment. But somehow, they were like - oh, but that person was so nice.

DEMBY: That person was so nice to me. And that's one of the really fascinating - and I guess, disheartening - things about the way discrimination works is that even when it's, like, right up in your face, sometimes you can't even see it unless it's in the aggregate.

MARTIN: NPR's Gene Demby - thanks so much, Gene.

DEMBY: Thank you, Rachel.

(SOUNDBITE OF GABRIEL GARZON-MONTANO'S "THE GAME (INSTRUMENTAL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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One of the paradoxes of racial discrimination is the way it can remain obscured even to the people to whom it's happening. Here's an example: In an ambitious, novel study conducted by the Urban Institute a few years ago, researchers sent actors with similar financial credentials to the same real estate or rental offices to ask about buying or renting a home or apartment.

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Compared to the treatment of African Americans in the 1800s, America has made great progress in the racial equality and freedom of black people. They can hold office, own big businesses, be anything a white person could be. This is an idealized version of reality. In reality, black people are still discriminated against in their day to day life. More than 70% of the prison population is made up of African Americans, as well as those on death row. Around the country black people have been victims of police brutality, being injured and subject to types of unnecessary, harsh treatment. In that aspect, not much has changed since the time of Huck Finn. There is a seeming lack of opportunity for colored children, especially those in a large city where crime and violence runs high. Unemployment rates are also higher for black people, and they are more likely to be uninsured. Facts like that are why African Americans still not treated equally and given equal opportunity, and are subject to live in areas of poverty and face discrimination in everyday life.

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Reflections on Race in America Today.: Discovery Service for Maine State Virtual Library

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When nearly 90% of white people in America show an innate racial bias towards white people than black people, there's a race problem. When 60% of non-African-Americans think that blacks are less intelligent than whites, and two thirds of people think blacks are lazier than whites, there's a race problem. These statistics prove that racial issues are still apparent today, though it has been over a century since Twain's novel. When Jim was a slave in Missouri, he was treated like an object, lesser to anyone else, anyone white. The fact that these issues are still circulating today is proof enough that racial segregation is still an issue throughout America, though the severity in which it is depicted is less than that of the time where Jim and Huck Finn lived.

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Today, African Americans can hold numerous High level positions, like the government. People idolize black people who become mayor, senator, president, but they seem to push aside the growing number of the African American working class citizens who are having their income shrink every year. As people say, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", and that seems to be the case here. There have been obvious strides taken towards equality, in the time of Huckleberry Finn, black people were enslaved and never truly free from the grasp of the white men, they didn't have any representation, couldn't vote, and they were treated like dirt in society. Today, more African Americans have the ability to succeed everyday, though that is not consistent throughout the whole country. The number of African Americans living in poverty is significantly higher than white people, the average black child is nine times more likely to be a victim of homicide, four and a half times more likely to live with neither parent. These statistics show that though America has made progress in black equality, the overall truth is that black people are still treated unequally in society today.

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Join our low-volume email list | Reimagine!

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Today's emerging resistance movements can draw on a long and varied history to challenge the reactionary US government. Racial justice organizing has been the leading edge of progressive change for generations, and lessons learned and leadership from Black liberation struggles are key to moving beyond resistance and toward revolutionary abundance.

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Asking "What kind of Asian are you?" puts into perspective the way people are treating people that seem foreign to them. As said in Gate A-4, understanding gives people clarity and security. Being stereotyped is a major issue today in America, people generalize anyone from the Middle East to be Muslim, which causes people to fear that they are a terrorist or have bad intentions. They fear because they do not understand. Stereotyping people is prevalent throughout all races- black, white, Middle Eastern, Asian, everyone. People are uneducated on the history of those who come to America, they may have escaped wars, poverty, bad situations, but no one thinks about that. Instead , they ask "What kind of Asian are you?", inaccurately grouping people by how they look, not their pasts. Versions of this was apparent in Huckleberry Finn, anyone who saw a black person would automatically assume they were a slave or a runaway- just because they're black. Falsely grouping people together because of their looks has been occurring throughout history. Jim was technically a free man, but because of his appearance, he was treated poorly and unfairly because he was black. People try to oppress what is different to them, what they do not understand. But only when they understand will they see clearly and feel security.

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Hysteria and confusion surrounded the old woman howling in Arabic. Her flight had been delayed, but the poor woman thought it was cancelled- she was on her way to El Paso for major medical treatment the following day. The flight agents were frantic and did not know what to do about the woman, unable to understand her. People are afraid of what they can't understand. When Naomi began to speak to her in her native tongue, they began to have common ground, the situation deescalating. Naomi had her call her son, to tell him the situation, followed by the rest of her sons, Naomi's dad, and Palestinian poets. Talking to people allows them to connect and form relationships. When the lady offered up her cookies to everyone, they graciously accepted. Unity comes with understanding; people need something to help them understand and feel confident in the situation. There could have been many different endings to this story, like if security was called because no one could the poor old woman who was merely confused. Understanding gives people security, which is what all people inherently want. Everyone in Gate A-4 put behind their ideas about foreign people, to become a part of something bigger than any race- unity.

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Most Americans Think They Face Discrimination

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Most Americans Think They Face Discrimination

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"Over 200 black people die prematurely every single day in America, in part because of racism in society" - David Williams
According to the polls taken, African Americans are still discriminated against in many ways, involving the police, health care, neighbors, and in their workplace. 61% of of police officers are more likely to use unnecessary force on African Americans, and 31% of blacks avoid calling the police for assistance due to fear of discrimination, proving that cruelty unfairness within the government is still apparent today. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim could not go to anyone, especially the police for help, he would be lynched for being a runaway slave. Blacks also avoid medical care for the same reason, which relates to when Jim brought Tom to the doctor to save his life. Jim knew the discrimination he would face, and for that reason did not really want to go, but put his life and freedom after Tom's, which saved the boys life. African Americans today still face discrimination and unfair treatment in all aspects of their lives, from buying houses to becoming involved in politics, but it is still a step forward from the time period of Huck Finn, where black people were still treated like objects not people, and they had no rights at all.