Eurocentric Perspective In Criminal Justice

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Pages: 6

The United States has a dark racial history. The country was built with the help of slave labor, who would not be freed from their chains until the occurrence of the country’s bloodiest war. Even after African-Americans were freed from slavery, they were still the focus of much ridicule, especially the Jim Crow laws. Any citizen that was not white would forever be equal, but separate. During this history, a lot of tension and hatred bridged a gap between whites and non-whites. Even today, there is still seen remnants of racial prejudice, especially in the criminal justice system. The disproportionate number of African-Americans to Caucasians that are incarcerated and the different treatment received from police officers by non-whites makes …show more content…
and because the news has become so commercialized they present the events that is believed to arouse the most attention, even if that means distorting the truth a little. The Eurocentric perspective is convinced that the criminal justice system is not racist, but the media’s focus on black crime and the Afrocentric perspective says otherwise. When thinking about African Americans, whether one is racist or not, the general image that comes to mind is a young black male living in an inner city area. One typically sees gang and drug involvement with this young black male even though it does not pertain to all people of color. Still, the image of a young black male has come to represent crime and people begin to learn the behavior of seeking out this image, mostly among police. This image probably arrived because of the main focus on street crime in the media. Violence catches an audiences’ attention and street crime is fascinating to viewers. It is more exciting to hear about murder, rape, and robberies than to listen to fraud or money laundering, which few people even understand. Because whites are known to commit more white collar crimes whereas non-whites commit more street crimes, viewers are seeing the image of non-white offenders more often in the media than white offenders. More specifically, one can look at crack versus cocaine. Although there is not a huge difference between crack and cocaine, for a long time crack had a large penalty compared to cocaine, a ratio of one hundred to one. Crack is much cheaper to buy than cocaine and crack is more common in inner city regions. The location and low expense of crack had many African Americans purchasing the drug, whereas cocaine is mostly used by whites. The large penalty and heavily enforced law to stop crack had many African Americans arrested, creating a bigger stereotype that blacks are all criminals. If one stopped focusing on street crimes and only certain cases where