The perception of racism towards African Americans in the United States is shown through both current American novels and films. Almost all novels and films made today portray a sense of racism towards African Americans and continually present the African American gangster and the white man hero. Unfortunately, many African Americans are classified as less skilled, educated, and trustworthy than whites. More specifically, the novel Southland acknowledged a different racial perception of the job towards whites and people of color in relation to being a police officer. White people are continually represented as the real power, social and economic, by the jobs they are assigned and the actions they take. Several novels, films, and critical readings demonstrate how African Americans are poorly represented compared to whites due to jobs and characteristics that continually lead to them becoming the bad guys. In the novel Southland, the two main police officers during the investigation are Nick Lawson and Robert Thomas is assigned to find out the truth about the murders of the four African Americans in the freezer. Lawson, the white police officer, is assumed to be the killer because he is white and the children are black, but in reality the black police officer Thomas ends up being the bad guy. Lanier “could not imagine that this man, this black man, would commit such an act against children…the murders were even worse, somehow, because Thomas had committed them” (Southland, 316). This is important because the idea that whites and African Americans are trying to become less segregated in real life is portrayed as a villain who backstabs and kills people of his own race to provide for himself. The i...... half of the document ...... edited by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40034371Black Cities/White Cities: Evaluating the PoliceSusan E Howell, Huey L. Perry, Matthew VilePolitical BehaviorVol. 26, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 45-68Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4151358Revoyr, Nina. South. New York, NY: AkashicBooks, 2003. Print. Ayer, David, Script. Training day. Dir. Antoine Fuqua." Warner Bros: 2001, Film. El Mariachi: Hybrid Exploitation Film Charles Ramirez Berg Latino images in film; Stereotypes, subversion, resistance 2002, pp-225-239 Towards understanding Gerald Horne Fire this time; The revolt by Watts and the 1960s Published by: University Press of Virginia1995, pp 23-42Racial FormationsMichael Omi and Harold WinantRacial Formations in the United StatesSecond Edition, pp 13-18