The many shades of prejudice

By Chandan K Jha & Sudipta Sarangi

Discrimination, whether in India or the US, is motivated by different factors and contexts. It helps to separate the strands

Some weeks ago, a shocking video showing a South Carolina policeman shooting down an unarmed man as he was running away came to light; needless to say it created a furore all over the US. It reminded people of a similar incident that occurred last August in which an 18-year-old boy, again unarmed, was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

There have been other such incidents — the killing of a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, Ohio and the death of a 43-year-old man from a chokehold applied by a police officer in New York City last year. The list goes on.

Quite apart from the issue of police brutality, this has brought to the fore the issue of racism and racial discrimination in the US. Because in all the instances the victims were black and the police officers white. However, the answer, as economists will argue, is not so simple.