10 Ways Racism Killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/10-ways-racism-killed-michael-brown-and-eric-garner


Lesley McSpadden, the mother of slain teenager Michael Brown, attends a community meeting held to discuss the killing of her son. Photo: AFP
Photo Credit: AFP Photo

***SNIP

What is my evidence for this claim?

1. The United States, from its founding to the present, is structured around maintaining the dominant power position of those people who are categorized as “white”.
America, as a society structured around racial inequality and hierarchy, will reflect that dynamic in its politics, culture, and social institutions. Thus, the legal system and the police will reflect America’s dominant ideologies. America is a racist society; it logically follows that its social and political institutions will channel those values.

2. In his essential book, Discipline and Punish, preeminent social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault detailed how a society’s legal system and approach to punishment and incarceration reflect the values and norms of its elites and dominant group.

***SNIP

3. Police in America can trace their origins to the slave patrollers and “paddy rollers” of the antebellum South. Their goal was to support and protect the Southern Slaveocracy by terrorizing black people. The violence, terror, and harassment of black and brown communities, and the violation of the civil liberties of black and brown people, are not aberrations or outliers. They are part of a long cultural habit and tradition of racist behavior by American police departments and other law enforcement agencies.

4. As Michelle Alexander and others have extensively documented, there is racial bias against black people at every level of the criminal justice system. The cumulative effect of institutional and interpersonal racism by police and other law enforcement agencies is that black people are disproportionately incarcerated, receive longer sentences for the same crimes as white people, and are subjected to supervision and harassment by the legal system throughout their lives. The United States is a two-tier racially ordered society where the color line extends to the criminal justice system.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. This list-mania journalism trivializes very serious subjects.

Sorry to dump on your thread.

[malaise]

2. And the media is just as racist

It's all about hegemony.