crime

Stop Normalizing Black-Crime Association

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Something that has especially stuck out to me over the past few weeks has been the ideas presented in an article we read by Jennifer L. Eberhardt on ?Enduring Racial Associations African Americans, Crime, and Animal Imagery?. Within this article, she discusses the stereotypes associated with Black people in relation to crime. She also discusses how there are many factors that influence this, such as the stereotype of blacks as being hostile, dangerous, or criminals, which according to her, is …

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Black Children At Risk

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Children of color are at a high risk of being negatively impacted by implicit prejudices and biases. The way that people manifest their prejudiced beliefs can be dangerous to children’s ability to learn and be successful outside of the classroom. In a study done by Goff et al. (2014), children of color were much more likely to be perceived as older than they actually were. Young boys of color are then treated as older when going through the criminal justice …

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A Conversation With a Cop

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I recently met a police officer two years older than me. I started talking to him and having friendly conversation before learning that he was a cop. Naturally, upon finding out about his career, I asked him his thoughts on the current Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality. His response was “Yea, it’s a shame that it was a few bad cops. I work with hispanic people and stuff. I’m definitely not racist.” This is where we can look …

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The Disturbing Phenomenon of Missing White Woman Syndrome

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On the news, think about the last time you saw media coverage about a missing young, attractive white woman. Now, what about a woman of color? Do you often see extensive media coverage about a missing person of color? I didn’t think so. This phenomenon has been called “missing white woman syndrome” – the term used to describe when missing upper-class white women make up a majority of the media coverage surrounding disappearances as opposed to women of color. This …

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Why is black skin viewed as a weapon?

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One of the leading causes of death for young black men, is police brutality. Young black men in their mid to late 20’s have about a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by police (source needed). For many of them they are murdered while they are unarmed and are committing no crime. However, we can see time and time again white mass shooters being taken alive in the most difficult of circumstances. Yet while police are obviously capable of …

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Kids are Still Kids No Matter their Skin Color

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When it comes to police officers who murder young Black or brown kids, the important piece here is that the children themselves were performing harmless acts – yet those acts were seemingly threatening to a police officer. When has there ever been a White child who was sought after by a police officer for just playing in a park? These kids are just kids. Just because of the color of their skin does not immediately make them more dangerous than …

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Gender, Queerness, and Performative Masculinity as an Escape: An Analysis of Moonlight

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In her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, Hortense Spillers argues that the gendered configuration for Black people through slavery and its afterlife is “the dehumanizing, ungendering, defacing project of African persons” (Ziyad, 2017). She points out that, historically, Black gender has not been used to indicate a shared womanhood or manhood with people within white society, but to highlight how black people are out of step with womanhood and manhood. Essentially, Black gender can never be done “right” (Ziyad, 2017). …

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