African American Racial Bias

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The incarcerated population is 2.3 million, African Americans now constitute almost 1 million of that 2.3 million (NAACP). Racial bias in the court system has become a huge problem for African Americans but especially African American youths today. Causing the relationship between black communities and law enforcements to slowly parish. Starting with the Trayvon Martin case in 2012, when the unarmed seventeen year old was fatly shot by George Zimmerman who was the neighborhood watch, that found Martin to be suspicious which then influenced his next actions which ended up killing Martin. The courts also found Zimmerman not guilty under self-defense accusations and was let off a free man which shocked the nation. While some believe racial profiling …show more content…
But these past couple years there’s been a huge increase in issues of racial discrimination that’s happening all around the world, in the court system, policing, and more. Racial bias becomes a huge factor in this issue, when people let their assumptions control their judgement, said best by Charles M. Blows in his “Crime, Bias and Statistics” column in the New York Times saying that while Whites do commit minor and major offenses nobody looks at the whole race as criminals but when the roles are switched and they’re Black the whole African American race is tainted and looked upon as criminals (1). Blows goes further on with this theory stating “The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American. When we think about crime, we ‘see black,’ even when it’s not present at all”. This is such a devastating characteristic that many people carry but it’s even worse when people with power carry this …show more content…
The NAACP stated that “five times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at ten times the rate of Whites, also, In 2002, blacks constituted more than 80% of the people sentenced under the federal crack cocaine laws and served substantially more times in prison for drug offenses than did whites, despite the fact that more than ⅔ of crack cocaine users in the U.S are White and Hispanic” (1). Even in Africa they’re having these problems, saying that the SA legal communities and politicians have noticed this trend and have voiced their opinions about how justice cannot be foreseeable while racism is still entrenched in our judicial system (“Did The Punishment Fit The Crime?”). They had a case where a man by the name of Odendaal was sentenced 10 year imprisonment and three years suspended for four years given by the Bloemfontein High Court Judge for the killing of Mosoko Rampuru (“Did The Punishment Fit The Crime?”). Since then this sentencing has caused an uproar in their communities because they’ve realized the leniency granted to whites in cases where they’ve murdered blacks (“Did The Punishment Fit The Crime?”). Khulekani Ntshangase a spokesman for the ANC Youth league in Africa suggest that there should be minimum sentencing for racially driven crimes which given the
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