Similar to Chapter 7, a lot of chapter 8 called out racial tensions between officers and the minority community especially the black community. What a lot of people fail to realize and I like that the chapter called out is that this racial tension is not new. The covert racial institutional systems have started since slavery when the subjugation  of black people was legalized. As the laws changed that allowed black people more autonomy and rights, other laws and practices developed  on top of them to hold black people back. For example; even after the 13th amendment abolished slavery, the Jim Crow laws of the south was another way of making black people inferior, and the federal government wanting to maintain peace, and the federal government did nothing for years until civil rights protest. I found a reoccurring theme with the government is that they see the racial problems and only become active to make changes when protests, and more recently violence commences. Most recently it has been the Black Lives Matter movement, and the relationship between officers and the black community. Police violence, and excessive force towards African Americans is nothing new, and has stemmed since slavery. Statistics even shows that black men are arrested, indicted, and convicted at a higher rate than white men, and they only make up 6% of the entire US population. Here in New York City, they are stopped and frisked more, and according the CQ Researcher, the overall national death rate due to the police’s aggressive tactics is over 1000 people in the last year. What makes all of these statistics saddening is that the government did not become involved in mending the relationship until protests began, and some of law enforcement themselves were being killed. This brings up the question that if law enforcement themselves were not being killed, would the government even pay attention to the relations between the two groups? Even with the protests, they are not making active steps to change how law enforcement behaves. 

Not only did the chapter explain race relations between law enforcement and black people, I enjoyed how they connected that relation to low income communities, housing segregation, and education. When you think about the housing segregation, and the minimal education of children in low income communities, you notice the correlation between these two factors and the current racial tensions now. After WWII, while white army veterans were given loans to buy homes in the suburbs, black veterans were not leaving them in the urban areas surrounded by underdeveloped housing. What many people do not know which the the chapter did highlight was that were one lives also affects the education that they get. Low income communities usually get the worst teachers, minimal to no extracurricular activities, and steered away from college and into vocational schools, because counselors and teachers don’t think that they can handle the pressures of it. Many students especially males, recognizing that they will not make it far turn to criminality so that they can provide for themselves, which leads to the racial tension between law enforcement and minority communities because as criminality increase the amount of police officers that need to be in the neighborhood increases. s well as the stigma that minority males are violent criminals. One part of the text that confused me was the statement made that middle class black people had an easier time after the civil rights movement than low income black people. I wish the author would explain what they meant by that statement. Reading the chapter verified the correlation that I have noticed and learned between slavery and the race relations that are occurring now. What I realized is that race relations will never change unless we all realize the covert ways that racism still systematically exists. By ignoring it, or saying that legalized racism does not exist anymore makes problems like police brutality seem more like a complaint than an actually problem. In order to make race relations better, we need to have these open conversations of change.