The article “Police Brutality” written by Ed. Jill Nelson throws light on discrimination and brutal behavior of police in USA against Black people. The story revolves around two main characters John - a Black man and his wife, a White lady. John’s behavior is depictive of a Black man’s During their journey on the interstate highway, they stop to ask about the address from a cop and after few minutes their car is pulled over by another patrolling car because John, a Black man was driving the car in White people’s area, West Port. Apparently, there is no reason to stop the car because it’s condition is very good but racial discrimination force cops to stop the car. Above all, instead of asking John to come out of the car police officer pulls…
Often when racial inequality and discrimination is being discussed, we get to think of terms such as “white privilege” and American history with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But we think of it, mainly as history. And that, according to Tim Wise, an anti-racism activist and American writer, is the biggest self-deception of the modern American world. Throughout an article posted on his own webpage, concerning school shootings, Tim Wise discusses the general American attitude towards this relatively new phenomenon in American society. With the use of especially pathos Wise argues that the most concerning thing about these events is how society is handling them afterwards. The problem is, according to Wise, that white people tell themselves ‘white lies’, and therefore never think that such actions could be taking place in their communities. He claims that there’s a reason why this happens in the outwardly ordinary societies. It’s because the people, trying to maintain at certain surface of innocence, refuse to see the signs of trouble, even when it’s going on before their very eyes.…
In a video called “I Am Sean Bell”, directed by Stacey Muhammad, one of the men interviewed says “It’s unfortunate that it has to happen over and over again for people to actually feel something about it”. This video features young men featured in this documentary talk about how they feel about the incidents of the police shooting young men and what should be done to change the prejudice and stereotypes that surround young African American teens. The teens in the video feel like the police continually get away with taking the lives of young black men and there is no justice. This is a serious problem because these young men are being traumatized by the brutality of police officers…
On August 28th, 1955, Emmet Louis Till, a 14-year old African American boy from Chicago, was brutally murdered by two white men in Money, Mississippi. 59 years and 87 days later, on November 22nd, 2014, in Cleveland, OH, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was the victim of two white police officers’ fatal brutality. Neither boy chose to lose his life to become a martyr, but both became important symbols of the black civil rights movements in the mid-century and today. Though there have been marginal gains in African Americans’ modern influence on the judicial system and ability to speak out against injustice, the comparison of both murders exposes the ways that white Americans have failed to address the institutionalized racism and inequality that leads…
Susan Ruddick highlights this in, “Constructing Differences In Public Spaces”. This article highlights that race, class and gender are interlocking systems in public spaces. Ruddick depicts the aftermath Just Desserts robbery in 1994, with other racialized crimes as prime examples of race and gender attributing towards the negative implications black people endure on a daily basis. A microaggression that can be seen here are marginalized groups being easily stereotyped from criminal incidents because of national headlines and the victims being mostly white women. In the middle of the article, Ruddick’s note of the Central Park Five case brings out the point that in the media, there is an immediate favor towards the victims, who are predominantly white women. In discussing marginalized groups, it brings the fact that black men are perceived to be a “menace to society, (Ruddick, 9)”. Towards the end of the article, Ruddick analyzes and comes up with the conclusion that in terms of public spaces, the media creates a medium that brings out local and national images of racial ethnicities which can be “constructed and contested,” (Ruddick, 10). This final point highlights that from these criminal incidents, the national media has portrayed a negative image towards minority groups, especially men of color. This article serves as one of the main components of how minority groups are marginalized and how…
In “Stand Your Ground Laws: Preliminary Report and Recommendations”, The National Task Force said that “racial disparities are likely to be found to justifiably exist in Stand Your Ground States. The rates in those states are significantly higher. A white shooter that kills a black person is three hundred fifty percent more likely to be found justified than a black shooter that killed a white person” (Common Dreams, 2014). The Tampa Bay Times investigation was used to show how race plays a major role in Stand Your Ground. The investigation teams analyzed two hundred Stand Your Ground Cases in Florida and found that “seventy-three percent of those who killed a black person were found not guilty and fifty-nine percent who killed a white person were found not guilty. It also states that the twenty-six percent of those who killed a black person were found guilty and forty-one percent who killed a white person were found guilty” (Hundley, 2012). The researcher does not say white perpetrator, black victim or black perpetrator; he just says, “white victim”. This shows how the criminal justice system is when it comes to race. The researcher also stated that Blacks are killed because people see them as a threat. This is racial profiling and it exists in laws and in people…
There has been many events where police officers are hurting unarmed innocent black people. It's been a topic of discussion for a long time now and relates to the system of justice and inequality that Bryan Stevenson brings up. People will treat you…
It is a known fact that there more afican amaerican in prison than there is of any race. African americans have always received the shorter end of the stick. In the article Crime, Cops, and Context speaks about the victimization of black and latino youth in New York specifically. These boys were victimized by New York police department. In the text it states, "Recent study figures predict that 80% of Black men ages 18 to 19 will likely bestopped by the police—versus 40% for Latino males, and about 12% for White males giving credence to the idea that 'race evidently became a factor in everyday policing'" (Rengifo, 2016,p. 456). This conveys the argument that blacks are targets to police officers. When a person sees a young black male in a group with friends they tend to believe the boys are in a gang or…
“I can't breathe, I can’t breathe" are the words Eric Garner repeated multiple times as he was held in a choke hold and brought to the ground by New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo. There are countless tragedies that have affected not only the black community, but other racially profiled minorities from the constant monster that all have learned to instill their trust into: The Police. Who does a person call when the murderer wears a badge? These are the questions asked by those affected by the loss of a loved one, or friend as a result of police brutality. As time continues to pass, it has become seemingly clear that one minority is greatly affected by this monstrosity: The black community. There has been constant debate over police brutality and racial profiling in the United States; incidents such as the deaths of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin have led to the recent movements of the Black Lives Matter Campaigns, and have been widely debated over making many people question, whose life really matters?…
Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and Freddie Gray are just a few of the names that in the past year have intruded our lives and made themselves known with a commanding presence. With a certain ease, their stories made waves across the country resulting in a mass migration of people to whatever side suited their opinions; the police or the ‘victims’. The ‘sudden’ uptick in racially charged police shootings highlights the problem with society exquisitely! Upon hearing an iota of detail, one side of a story, we jump to conclusions about what happened. But, why is it a problem that we do that? Well, for starters, the victims in these police shooting cases often get the ‘spotlight’ first. This allows for them, or those…
In 2012 an underage teen named Trayvon Martin was fatally shot trying to go home from the store by a man named George Zimmerman. In 2011 twelve year old boy named Tamir Rice was shot by police for playing with a bebe gun outside. A girl named Aiyana Jones was shot by a policeman while she was sleeping on the couch during a home raid by police. There are many more of these cases, one thing they have in common, they were all black and all cases were ruled as not guilty. 41 black boys have been reported shot unarmed since 1980 to 2012, the average age of blacks killed by police was 30 the average age of whites was 35 ( deadly force in black and white Gabrielson). The black lives matter group no matter how old the case is still trying to get justice for the family. Trayvon’s family got higher than a million. There's a 49 percent chance of a black person getting shot by police than a white person and at least half the cases remain not guilty. At least fourteen police officers got away with murdering an unarmed black teenage alone in the year 2015 ( chuffington post…
People like Keith Childress, Bettie Jones, Kevin Matthews, Leroy Browning, Roy Nelson, Tiara Thomas, and about 95 others lost their lives in 2015 to police brutality. What many don’t know about these individuals is that all of them were unarmed. Statistics show that police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly two each week(http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/). Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in officer(s) being charged with a crime, and only 1 of these deaths (Matthew Ajibade) resulted in convictions of the officers involved. Only one of the two officers convicted received jail time. To add more fuel to the fire, the officer only has to serve his sentence exclusively on the weekends. This officer received freedom, while his victim can no longer breathe which supports how the racial discrimination has an immense influence on racial policing…
Hands up. Don’t shoot. The image of black men and women repeating the simple action at protest in Ferguson, Missouri and across the globe—generates its power from what happens before that moment. In Ferguson and too many places, police are more likely to pull over people of color for driving-indeed, often for simply being a person of color. But there is lasting power in the stories people never forget. They are stories of ‘broken’ taillights, police brutality that doesn’t show up in an arrest report because there never was one, of no justice because nobody knew where to turn. To help reach beyond Ferguson, the opinion department of Guardian US and the St Louis Post-Dispatch partnered to gather hundreds of reader experiences.…
On April 19, 1995, around 9 a.m. a yellow Ryder Rental truck pulled up into a parking area outside the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Two minutes later all hell broke loose as the truck’s 4000-pound cargo blasted the government building shattering one-third of the seven-story building. Investigators got it right, they said the suspect was a white male, possibly with military training. Timothy McVeigh thinking he was defending the Constitution, caused the death of 168 and wounded more than 500 others (Ottley, n.d). Nobody was surprised because it seemed like something a “white person” would do.…
Like when there are criminals on the loose, they are there to stop them. Instead, there are others who can’t do their job right, some cops think that the best way to deal with problems are to shoot the victims. The law states that you can’t fire at someone is unarmed. Cops should have better training for when it is the right time to use their gun at the right time. With situations like this, it is the reason why the “Black Lives Matter Movement” exists today. In August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, 18-year-old Michael Brown African- American was shot by a white police being…