Flipping through TV channels the other night, I came across one of my favorite shows, Cops. I only had to watch for about 10 minutes before I started noticing some biased policies within the police force. Officers often talk about how they drive through the “projects” or down dark alleys to look for criminal activity, usually petty drug deals, instead of patrolling random areas. They also set up undercover operations where they use former convicted drug users to set up drug deals and then bust the dealers, taking advantage of poverty, race, and lack of opportunity on both ends of the situation.
According to the NAACP, “African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population” (x) which clearly indicates bias and discrimination within the system, as African Americans make up roughly 13% of the total U.S. population and yet represent close to 50% of individuals in jail or prison. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that these numbers don’t match up, and yet so many people deny the existence of statistically provable institutionalized racism in our beautiful United States of America. This is largely due to the fact that racist policies have moved from Jim Crow and the KKK to “New Jim Crow”, as is discussed in the reading for this week. One recently published book by Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, examines in-depth the language used by the likes of Clinton and Reagan to appear colorblind, unbiased, and politically correct in order to disguise true underlying racist and classist biases and policies. I would recommend giving this book a flip-through, as it sheds light on our politicians and our media, revealing discrimination and 1984-esque “newspeak” that is present in the very sources that we normally look to for information, education, and enlightenment. Another great tool to check out is The Sentencing Project, which takes a look at racial disparities within the American justice system and proposes reform projects.
This is an extremely pressing and serious issue, and the public needs to have their eyes opened to the new ways in which racism is subtly integrated into our American way of life. But besides grassroots and org efforts, how can such a large, complex, and historically rooted system of inequality be dismantled? There was a recent discussion on the news of the new requirement of Los Angeles police officers to wear small video cameras on their uniforms in order to increase police accountability and to limit biases. In my opinion, this may be just the sort of thing needed to begin fighting institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system, but do you think it will be good enough? Is this the type of policy we need, and will it be effective, or will it bring up even more issues? What do you think?
JE
This entry was posted by joyevans on Friday, March 7th, 2014 at 10:11 am and is filed under 03/07, R&R.
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