America has been referred to as a cultural melting pot for quite some time now, and most Americans would probably agree that they would not consider themselves to be racist. Well, a video making the rounds on the internet recently may dispute that belief.

ABC performed an investigation into the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle beliefs held by average Americans. They arranged a situation where an upper-middle class neighborhood was presented with three different people all performing the same suspicious behavior. The results were nothing short of astounding.

The show locked up a bike to a street sign and had three actors come out at different times in an attempt to steal the sign. The actors all were of about the same age, gave similar answers every time a passerby questioned them, and all had similar equipment they were using in an attempt to break the lock. The only real difference was that one was a white male, another a black male, and the third was a white female.

First up in the video we can see the white male hacking away at the lock. Though people certainly took notice, only some of the nearby pedestrians ever said anything to the male, who looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. Even though the male was instructed to give vague and potentially incriminating answers, for over an hour he was allowed to do as he pleased.

When the black male came on the camera, however, the video took a decidedly nasty turn. Immediately the residents walking by in the neighborhood started to question and harass the male. They snapped photos and called the police. In no time the gig was us. When ABC tried to put the black male out there a second time, again he was immediately questioned and confronted by nearby individuals.

As sad as it is to see, this type of thing has been going on in America for quite some time now. There is a reason why the U.S. has the world's largest prison population, and it may not be because Americans like to throw people in jail. If such a bias exists like it's shown in the video above, the cause for such a high number of prisoners may come down to nothing more than racism. With the vast majority of prisoners coming from the minority population, that idea may not be as far-fetched as it seems.

Beyond the politics of racism and the prison population, however, lurks another interesting phenomenon shown in the video. ABC's program may have also shown that sexism is still very much alive in America.

When an attractive woman was sent out by ABC to steal the bike, things got downright weird. The woman was stopped by people who were curious as to what she was doing with the bike, but when she gave evasive answers similar to the ones given by the first two males, she was not confronted at all. Rather, the men who stopped the female actually asked her if she needed help, and on at least one occasion, a man even acknowledged that he knew she was stealing and told her he didn't mind lending a hand.

Though this neighborhood may not be typical of all areas in the United States, the drastic nature of the varying responses to ABC's actors certainly makes one stop and think, is my community capable of such blatant bias? That's a worthwhile question to ask, though a better one may be: I'm I already exercising this bias?