A plethora of legislative changes were made during the 1960s that were supposed to ensure that all Americans, regardless of their skin color, had access to housing, an education and the right to vote. That racism persists in America today, though, comes as a surprise to many left-leaning Americans.

Schools are still integrated, Americans claim to have friends and colleagues from various ethnic and racial backgrounds, and the country has an African-American president. While many struggle to understand how racism can still exist here, it’s easy to see that American society is plagued with racist policies that disproportionately affect Americans of African, Latin and Middle Eastern descent.

As the controversial policy known as stop and frisk clearly illustrates, those who are black- or brown-skinned are more often assumed to be engaged in dangerous criminal activity than their white counterparts. Of the 191,558 times people were stopped and frisked in New York City in 2013, the person stopped was white only 11 percent of the time. Overt, violent racism may no longer exist in mainstream America, but white privilege continues to run rampant in the U.S. A majority of Americans are not only oblivious to this type of racist policy, but when it’s pointed out to them, many do nothing to stop it.

Christopher E. Smith, a white man, attorney and criminal justice professor, is the father of a biracial son who has darker skin. In the April 2014 issue of The Atlantic, Smith shared how his son’s skin color has directly influenced the way people, especially law enforcement, treat him.

Even when Smith’s 21-year-old son, a student at Harvard University, was working as an intern on Wall Street, Smith says his son was stopped and frisked “on more than one occasion” by police. These officers sometimes didn’t even identify themselves as NYPD officers until after the “frisk” was completed.

“On one occasion, while wearing his best business suit, [my son] was forced to lie face-down on a filthy sidewalk because—well, let’s be honest about it, because of the color of his skin,” Smith wrote. He detailed how his black in-laws have also been disproportionately stopped by police while on their way to his home for family events and holidays such as Thanksgiving.

Some of Smith’s relatives have even had guns pointed at their heads while being interrogated by police officers, who Smith says stopped his in-laws solely because of the color of their skin.

Because of this stereotypical assumption that a black, Latino or Middle Eastern person would be engaged in criminal behavior, Smith proposed an experiment in which police officers would be required to stop and frisk 10 white people — five men and five women — for every three non-white people they stopped without a warrant, suspicion or probable cause.

Smith said if police officers stopped and frisked white people in a manner similar to what young people of color have experienced throughout the years, white people would begin to argue that “it’s a waste of the officers’ time to impose these searches on innocent people,” and stop-and-frisk policies may cease to exist.

“I can tell myriad stories about the ways my son is treated with suspicion and negative presumptions in nearly every arena of his life. I can describe the terrorized look on his face when, as a 7-year-old trying to learn how to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk in front of our suburban house, he was followed at 2-miles-per-hour from a few feet away by a police patrol car—a car that sped away when I came out of the front door to see what was going on,” Smith wrote.

“I can tell stories of teachers, coaches, and employers who have forced my son to overcome a presumption that he will cause behavior problems or that he lacks intellectual capability. I can tell you about U.S. Customs officials inexplicably ordering both of us to exit our vehicle and enter a building at the Canadian border crossing so that a team of officers could search our car without our watching—an event that never occurs when I am driving back from Canada by myself.”

Smith isn’t the only one who has become aware of the white privileges he has been granted in the U.S. Author Cory Doctorow recently wrote a blog post inspired by Smith’s story, in which he says that he, too, has realized the rampant racism in the U.S. after traveling across the U.S.-Canada border with two people who happen to be black.

“At both border crossings, the car was searched from top to bottom, with officers taking out books and shaking the pages to look for contraband. It’s never happened since. The only difference between that drive and all the others was that there were some brown-skinned people in evidence,” Doctorow said.

Until those who enjoy privileges — such as white, male Christians — realize that it’s a choice to think in an anti-racist manner because racism is so embedded in American culture, columnist Kevin Leininger says Americans’ ignorance of racist ideologies will make it even more difficult to find real solutions and finally end America’s racist tendencies.