The Difference of Black and Right

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

Racial profiling is a problem that has affected the unification of the human race. Throughout Walter Mosley’s novel Devil in a Blue Dress, the author portrayed a character, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, who lived in a world of bigotry. To begin, Ezekiel was raised in a racism filled environment, which made him observe white people through a different outlook as well. Furthermore, many white characters in this novel made Easy the victim of racism. Additionally, Caucasian men took advantage of Rawlins as a poor negro living in Watts.

To begin, Ezekiel Rawlins discriminated against whites because he was surrounded by racism before living in Los Angeles. Easy grew up in the South where segregation and inequity was a way of life. He was raised in Houston, Texas during the nineteen-thirties and later went on to join the army. During World War II, Rawlins was treated as a lesser man, even by his own army. He described his true feelings after not standing up for himself towards his fellow Caucasian soldier, “I hated myself for it but I also hated white people, and colored people too, for making me that way” (pg. 21). It is hard for a black person to stand up for what is right when a white will take it as disrespect. Most white people in those days would not care if a black person died. It is easy to have feelings of hatred when one treats a person so poorly. Furthermore, when Easy was working his job he was a subject of abuse too. One boss had laid him off because he did not giving his white boss enough admiration. He talked about how his boss treated them as if they were children: "A job in a factory is an awful lot like working on a plantation in the South. The bosses see all the workers like they're children, and everyone knows how lay children are" (Page 108). The way bosses treated negro workers was with lack of respect and as if they were juvenile. In the South, African Americans were seen as a completely different class. The overseers did not believe that the negro workers were capable of doing anything more than assembly lines like factories. Easy sadly got his racial classifying trait from all the profiling that had surrounded him while he lived in Houston.

Furthermore, Easy had become the victim of bullying and bigotry. In Los Angeles at that time, police were very prejudice towards blacks that lived there. After there had been a murder of one of Easy’s friends, a couple officers had come to Rawlins’ house to question him. After Rawlins said he knew nothing about the murder, they immediately assumed he was lying. Easy explains the situation to the reader, "'You got a right to fall down and break your face, nigger. You got a right to die,' he said. Then he hit me in the diaphragm. When I doubled over he slipped the handcuffs on behind my back and together they dragged me to the car" (pg. 75). White people, especially police officers, tended not to care about negros in those days. Moreover, when Easy got to the police station for the interrogation, the officers continued with their abuse. “He wandered over to my left and before I could turn toward him I felt the hard knot of his fist explode against the side of my head” (pg. 77). These white people would step all over the African Americans and the African Americans would not be able to do anything about it. Meanwhile, no white person would feel ashamed at what was going on because they saw it as something normal, and went along with the stereotypical racial profile that black people were given. Ezekiel Rawlings had to experience very gruesome maltreatment, even from government figures.

Finally, Easy had been taken advantage of by other