Regardless of how much America claims to be a free country with equal opportunities for all, there will always exist a certain sense of prejudice and rivalry between all races. Over the years, despite anti-segregation or anti-discriminatory measures, society hasn’t managed to suppress or move on passed the racial gap. This is when it becomes evident in police cases such as the Rodney King beating case in which the police officers were acquitted. And nowadays, we just keep adding cases to the list, just like the death of Eric Garner and/or Robert Davis, a retired elementary school teacher suspected of intoxication. And there are many more. I agree with the article when it states that different people had different interpretations of the video that went viral after King’s beating. On one side, evidence such as a video could easily prove whether someone is guilty or not, however, it was also frustrating because even after the judge saw the video he still decided to acquit two of the four officers. This is the meanings I stuck with. Unfortunately, justice doesn’t always get the job done. In addition, the article states that the relations between communities cannot be mediated in a neutral fashion, and I completely agree with that. There isn’t such a thing as neutral in current society, as hard as that is to accept, there will always be some sort of biased actions/thoughts/words/procedures executed by someone.

Question: What do you guys propose as a solution for this gender inequality issue?

I found the Bushwick Daily to be an interesting website that provides insight about the community. For starters they have a section called “letters to Bushwick” where people can express their opinions, thoughts and concerns about important matters related to the community. One post that left an impression was a posted letter by a man who realized that he is part of the gentrification happening in Bushwick and as a result, sought out to speak to those who have lived there for a while. Gill, the neighborhood liquor store owner described how the area used to be filled with drugs and crime. Now, it is young people not from New York trying to survive in an already over populated city. He described it as “drunk post college kids running around where you grew up, forcing your mom and grandmother out of their homes.” Gill stresses that gentrification has made the area beautiful but difficult to afford when making minimum wage. (This point is proven in another post that describes a protest over a new build building that does not provide housing affordable for those already living in the community.)In the end, he posed the question of “What’re you bringing here?”

Can the new comers/ gentrification bring something positive to those already living there?

http://bushwickdaily.com/2015/04/letter-to-bushwick-at-the-intersection-of-the-gentrifier-and-the-gentrified-in-bushwick/

In regards to the United States incarceration system, this first piece by Norbal Morris and David J. Rothman discusses the system in action in the west-coast state of California. This may be personal bias but I do not think that this issue is a new issue that people are going to be surprised to hear about. The prison system, as the article states, has adopted this principle of mass-incarceration of people for misdemeanors like drug possession since before many of us in this class were even born. The reason given is that there is an “excess” of people–too many people with low-income jobs. The remedy proposed was a series of laws that would effectively put these people into a cyclic machine that would be more productive (in terms of revenue generation) than their current low to no income activities would. I think that if we could find a way to give these people a way to integrate into society more successfully, we would have less of a difficult time appeasing people who are supportive of this current system.

Question: With this mass-incarceration system being tied to the war on drugs, how can we separate the two now that they have become so thoroughly interlinked?

It is a poorly kept secret that our prison system needs massive reform – this is something that I’ve known about vaguely since I was fifteen or so. I did not know, however, the extent to which prison reform could be actively opposed. I thought it was a no-brainer! Our prisons are overcrowded and inadequate – this must be addressed. The conditions that Morris and Rothman describe, namely the unsanitary facilities and overcrowded compounds, are absolutely dreadful. I hadn’t realized how complex the politics of imprisonment really are. The competing interests, between the state and federal governments, plus their comprising departments, make navigating prison reform a nightmare, as illustrated by the Prison Fix reading. To me, being “tough on crime,” is a poor and superficial way to win political points. Often this means racial profiling and jail time for minor offenses, like drug possession. This is applicable not just to California, which the reading is about, but to the US as a whole. Our prisons wouldn’t be packed to the gills if we didn’t jail activists and drug users.

There were so many elements of the “Reel Time/Real Justice” article that I appreciated and admired, including the clever title. The first element was the author’s assertion that even if the two explanations given for the unjust verdict were to be “fixed” (change of venue and the failure of the prosecution to humanize Rodney King), it is wrong to assume that Rodney King would have been granted a fair trial. He further supports his assertion by pointing out that because narratives are artificially built in the courtroom, the King verdict was not extraordinary but typical. In the second half of the piece, the author presents his argument for why “reasonable force” and “equal force” need to be socially constructed, through narratives of time and space. The last element I want to mention is the rhetoric of “rule of law” vs. “no justice, no peace” and the translation of the two into reasonable and emotion, respectively. Even today, the media coverage surrounding public riots presents the participants as emotional and the riot itself to be an overreaction. In doing so, the media devalues the injustice being protested and weakens the movement. In conclusion, the philosophically dense arguments presented in the article were well thought out and remain relevant.

I’ve been asking this question for most of the semester now, and I’m trying desperately to ask any other question but I can’t think of one as important: how do we shape and use responsible rhetoric in argumentation and law to prevent the inevitable situation we’ve found ourselves in, of an Orwellian “nobody-read-my-politics-of-English-essay” nature?

In both pieces, the authors make explicit reference to how political bodies use rhetoric that masks the reality of what they’re doing with nicety and tact to make it more acceptable. As Crenshaw points out, w/re/to the stills of the King tape, this actually changes the reality of a situation as we perceive it—rhetoric is not then bound to an argumentative structure, but a narrative one. This realization is immensely important—with doublespeak levels of word invention, the reality of a situation changes and our ability to assess and talk about it diminishes.

A natural response to this that I can think of is to then shape rhetoric in a way that can be better used by the disenfranchised, but this has been tried (see the Occupy piece from weeks prior) and met with little success. Is there, then, some ability of a “neutral” rhetoric? But, even if this were invented, would it actually solve the problem if the language we use to tell these stories isn’t used emphatically enough—or with enough empathy? The nature of the world is that it is based on agreed subjective perception—how do we shape this perception to be empathetic?