crime – Contemporary Racism

The Dangerous Implications of Racialized Policing

Lily Bernecker — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 17:58:45 +0000

Racial disparities and discriminatory practices targeted at people of color remain a significant and deeply concerning issue in the United States. Built on hundreds of years of entrenched racism, the U.S. continues to show how both systemic and individual acts of bias shape institutions, influence public policy, and reinforce unequal outcomes across generations of marginalized communities. These racial disparities show up across nearly every domain of life, but the criminal justice system stands out as ...

What is Google Being Paid to Show You?

Carolina Escobar — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:45:02 +0000

It’s become clear to me that there’s an increasingly rising tension “between White and Black people.” I’m sure you might be accustomed to hearing this a lot by now if you live in the U.S. There is a caste system that places White people on top and Black people on the bottom. But what about all of the others that fall in between? How are they affected by this? Well, the Supreme Court recently allowed ...

Stop Before You Stereotype

Natstermac — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:26:47 +0000

I was born in a land littered with Confederate flags. Each flag you drive past holds generations worth of harmful stereotypes about Black Americans. Even if you aren’t from South Carolina, like me, stereotypes are constantly around us. They are found through our thoughts, conversations with others, information from the media, etc. Once we understand that a stereotype exists, what do we do with them? Do we let them control our thoughts and interactions? And ...

Stop Normalizing Black-Crime Association

Brittany Hurlock — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 15:40:51 +0000

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, ...

Black Children At Risk

Madeleine Kemo — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 19:11:32 +0000

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 ...

A Conversation With a Cop

Madeleine Kemo — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 16:01:48 +0000

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 ...

The Disturbing Phenomenon of Missing White Woman Syndrome

Emily Garber — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 16:11:18 +0000

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 ...

Why is black skin viewed as a weapon?

Audrey — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 17:22:53 +0000

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 ...

Kids are Still Kids No Matter their Skin Color

KarlyM — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 15:56:26 +0000

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 ...

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

Wilhelmina Minney — Sun, 17 Jun 2018 15:42:28 +0000

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 ...

Race, Terror and Mass Shootings

Sarah Prince — Tue, 01 May 2018 11:24:47 +0000

White males do the majority of mass shootings, yet people tend to associate violence and crime with people of color and minority groups. When the Stoneman Douglass school shooting happened it was rare to see media outlets talk about the shooters history of violence against minorities and it took days to find out that the shooter was apart of a white supremacist group. If this were a person of color someone associated with the Muslim ...

Mass Incarceration: Not Just a Social Problem

Ziming Han — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 17:58:59 +0000

Today when we talk about mass incarceration, many people may think that we are talking about a social problem. Yes, it is a big social problem, since America has become the country with highest incarceration rate for years, which is much higher than the incarceration rates of all other western industrial countries. Although each year the United States federal and states government spends about 70 billion dollars on incarceration, some prisons like which in Texas ...

Getting Away With It

Sarah Prince — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 20:00:40 +0000

I have scrolled through my Facebook and found far too many videos’ that capture police brutality. There are very few times I have been able to go on my Facebook feed without coming across a video that captures racism in violent acts. After which I would leave and log off of my social media. Not only has there been an increase in media coverage of these events but there has been an increase in occurrence ...

Offensive Graffiti at Our College

jgainsboro — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 19:31:08 +0000

I learned last week that we had an incident at our school with someone writing an anti-Semitic and sexist comment in one of our dorms. I had a conversation with the Dean of Student Life about it. The RA and Head Resident Assistant were apparently alerted that the comment that was written on or near the door of a student. The comment was taken down within four to five hours after being written. Campus Safety has been unable ...

Trump-isms: What’s Next?

Jessica Sperber — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 22:47:31 +0000

I write this on November 2nd, less than a week before the presidential election. I choose to write this now for multiple reasons: 1) it’s becoming pretty clear who the next POTUS will be, and 2) I’m honestly afraid of what the consequences will be. This evening in my Facebook Newsfeed, towards the bottom of the trending bar, was the label “Black Church Burned” (The Atlantic, 2016). Immediately I felt my stomach sink, and when ...

Know Your Facts

a_note — Sun, 02 Oct 2016 17:59:17 +0000

Over the weekend, our campus emails were blasted with a message from campus safety regarding a gun, which turned out to be a BB gun disguised as a real gun near campus. My friends and I obviously all saw the email and started to discuss the matter. I sat and listened to what they all had to say, and of course when any weapon is found it is quite frightening as this is supposed to be ...

When Law and Order Hits Close To Home

jgainsboro — Sun, 25 Sep 2016 21:58:56 +0000

In “Law and Order SVU: Season 13, Episode 6“ there is an episode involving a complicated situation regarding race. In this episode, a college-aged white girl is raped at gun-point by a black male. Throughout the episode they begin to question the girls story, learning that she is dating her piano teacher and cheated on him with another black male the night before. The lawyer hired to take on the rapists case is a black ...

Placing Chris Rock in Conversation with Beverly Daniels Tatum

Ashley Kemper — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 20:38:28 +0000

It seems as though anytime there is a widely-publicized instance of police brutality in the United States, my Facebook timeline is flooded with the same grainy YouTube clip entitled “How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police.” In the faux public service announcement filmed in 1998, comedian Chris Rock provides black viewers with a comical step-by-step guide to follow in order to avoid getting into trouble with the law. The skit is ...

Every. Single. Day.

nashkrod — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 16:09:54 +0000

Every. Single. Time. I got a campus safety alert in college, I crossed my fingers and hoped it was not a black or brown man. I remember hearing people say to stay away from sketchy neighborhoods in Allentown, which at the time didn’t look too different from where I grew up. I heard people talk about going to White Wawa instead of Black Wawa or “Blawa.” Some people would drive out of their way to exclusively ...

Checking the Box

G_Wolfe — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 18:25:38 +0000

Many job and college applications include a question that reads something like, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” While this may seem like a simple question, used to filter out people who have committed crimes, it actually has huge racial implications and is therefore a very problematic question to have on an application. Whether companies and colleges realize it or not, this question traces back to laws in the criminal justice system that ...

Who are They Really Surveilling?

Tatianap — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 02:57:53 +0000

I recently read some news that made me think a little more critically about authority. On the Highlands Today newspaper website they said that as of this week the officers of Lake Placid Florida would began to wear camera’s attached to their uniforms to video record their interactions with civilians on duty. This means that their patrolling, arrest, and other things that they do on their daily rounds will be recorded and under review! This ...

Are We Beginning to Chip Away at Mass Incarceration? An Example from New York State

Chris Chaky — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 02:17:37 +0000

Last week, our class discussed mass incarceration, the system by which a vastly disproportionate amount of people of color are imprisoned for the use or distribution of illegal drugs. The situation is quite bleak; the system has been escalating for the past few decades and has wreaked havoc among communities of lower class people of color. Nevertheless, there may in fact be a ray of light at the end of the tunnel. Throughout the country, ...

A Social Experiment on Crime and Color

jena.verlin — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 17:10:46 +0000

This week, I was browsing Buzzfeed instead of doing homework (as per usual), and I stumbled across an article/video about a “social experiment” done by two men: one black, one white. They parked their car on a public street and proceeded to fake break into the car and watch what happened. The white prankster tried for 30 minutes to break into the car, horn blaring, and nothing happened. A cop car even drove by and ...

Jordan Davis – Law and Implicit Prejudice

Chris Chaky — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 04:56:28 +0000

While what would have been Trayvon Martin’s birthday recently passed, a similar trial was finished in court – the trial of the murder of Jordan Davis. On November 23, 2012, Michael Dunn pulled into a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida. He saw a red SUV full of black teenagers playing loud music and walked up to them to complain. He thought he saw a gun being taken out, so he shot at the teenagers, killing ...

What Do You Stand For When You “Stand Your Ground”?

Annie — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 21:57:13 +0000

Many Americans have been following the Jacksonville, Florida case of Michael Dunn and Jordan Davis for the past few weeks. Dunn, a middle aged white man, fired ten shots into an SUV occupied with black teenage boys because of his frustration with their refusal to turn down the loud music they were playing. One of the boys, 17-year old Jordan Davis, was hit by three of those shots, and killed. Yes, you read that synopsis ...

Jordan Davis and Michael Dunn

EmilyBlakeslee — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 03:33:58 +0000

For our contemporary racism class, we read an essay by social psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt. The essay summarized her and her colleagues’ work on the cognitive associations we make about Black people and crime. For me, the findings were like a knife in the gut: we have unconscious prejudices that we often aren’t aware of, that can have dire consequences. In one study, participants were either unconsciously primed to think about crime or received no ...

Stand Your Ground

Ave.MariaLewis — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 23:45:45 +0000

After reading the articles that were assigned this week I found myself becoming increasingly mad. I know it is our second amendment right to bare arms, and that it is the person behind the gun that has ill intent not the inanimate object itself. I still tend to find myself in utter disbelief at the sheer ignorance of certain individuals in this country, and their definition of “self defense” against people of color. Certain laws ...

Racism in the Media?

Lauren B. — Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:45:20 +0000

After reading the Eberhardt article, I was left thinking about how her studies can be seen in the media. There are plenty of TV shows, movies, and books about the criminal justice system, and I started thinking about how her findings show up in these media outlets. The first thing I thought of was an episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, where a rich white celebrity shoots and kills and unarmed black teen. ...

Racial Stereotypes and NYC’s “Stop and Frisk”

Chris Chaky — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 04:55:47 +0000

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio recently followed through on his campaign promise to reform the city’s “Stop and Frisk” policy. “Stop and Frisk” is an NYPD program in which police stop a person and search him or her for weapons and drugs if they appear suspicious. In practice, people of color are stopped at a much higher rate than white people. Last year, a judge ruled that this policy was unconstitutional and that ...

Power Differentials

EmilyBlakeslee — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 03:07:05 +0000

I’m very curious about how we experience power in our everyday lives. It seems to me that power is crucial in our social interactions. When we have power, we feel like we control our circumstances, bringing order to an uncertain and chaotic world. In our social worlds, there are power differentials. That is, people will encounter situations in which one person is perceived or actually has more authority, agency, or knowledge then the other/s. Social ...

The Majority vs. Minority vs. Other Minority Race (pun intended)

AmandaRG — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 02:24:45 +0000

A friend shared another blog with me recently, called Black Girl Dangerous, that I believe has a lot of posts and discussions related to this class. One post (the link is at the bottom) called “Broke on Broke Crime: On Black and Brown Living and Unity,” written by Kitzia Esteva-Martinez, discusses her personal experience being mugged at gun-point by three young boys in her neighborhood. Kitzia identifies as Latina and identified the three boys as Black in ...

This is 2012…isn’t it?

Alexis — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:40:46 +0000

As I have watched the news and blogs lately I am shocked and saddened over the direction it would appear the United States continues to head. I think at this point we can all agree that this country is far from enlightened when it comes to issues of race and interracial interaction. I think it is also safe to say that we all are painfully aware that there is a lot of work to be ...

The Unknown Gravity Of Stereotyping

Tory — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 03:29:07 +0000

The following links provide news coverage about an assault that took place at Trinity College, which is about 15 minutes from the town I live in CT. http://vimeo.com/37918446 http://articles.courant.com/2012-03-05/community/hc-trinity-assault-0305-20120304_1_frederick-alford-trinity-tripod-trinity-college The victim was a Sophomore at Trinity College and the incident occurred in the early hours of the morning on Sunday March 4, 2012. Trinity College is located in Hartford, Connecticut, an area that does not hold a very good reputation for being safe. The second ...

Trayvon Martin

Simone — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:15:34 +0000

Though overt racism is no longer condoned in American society, it has been demonstrated that implicit or unconscious racism is still at work today. Whether known to the individual or not, racist beliefs and attitudes could greatly affect one’s behavior toward a member of another race. The case of Trayvon Martin screams explicit racism with a capital “E” letting me know that explicit/overt racism is alive and well in American society. A young black man ...

Trayvon Martin: ‘Racism without Racists’

nashkrod — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:06:39 +0000

Everyday people of color, especially young men of color are profiled. They are seen as criminal, unsafe, suspicious, etc. Unfortunately, this issue has to be brought to light to the eyes of many Americans through the story of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was shot and killed for appearing “suspicious.” Trayvon was unarmed, wearing a hoodie, and about 100 lbs lighter than his killer, George Zimmerman, but for some reason Zimmerman felt threatened. Zimmerman has yet ...

If He Wasn’t Wearing a Hoodie…

Michela — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 02:40:53 +0000

In light of the delayed Trayvon Martin coverage this week, Fox News caster Geraldo Rivera excused the actions of Zimmerman because of the hoodie Martin was wearing. Not only was Rivera blaming the victim, but he used a cultural frame to dismiss this grave injustice. It wasn’t just Rivera that has expressed this sentiment; this week when I was expressing my frustration and anger about the case, a friend of mine said, “I understand that ...

Trayvon Martin

Connie — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:09:53 +0000

U.S. Opens Inquiry in Killing of Trayvon Martin – NYTimes.com.

Does Race Have Anything to do With It?

Tory — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:01:32 +0000

The link below is a news article in the Hartford Courant regarding a member of the Northwest Catholic High School basketball team (my high school which I graduated from). http://www.courant.com/sports/high-schools/hc-zach-lewis-0210-20120209,0,2674229.story Zach Lewis was dismissed from the team as a result of an issue that occurred completely outside of school. The school was not obligated to kick him off of the team since the incident did not happen on school grounds. However, he is no longer ...

Crack Cocaine Sentencing

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 23:45:26 +0000

A group of students last year did their final project on the sentencing rules regarding crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. Essentially the rule said that, to get the same prison terms, powder cocaine offenders (who are typically White and sometimes affluent) needed to have 100 times more cocaine in their possession than crack offenders (who are typically Black). Here is a news story from the L.A. Times about changes to that 100 to 1 rule. ...

Racism? What Racism?

Lexie — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:23:15 +0000

When I started reading an article for this class last week and realized that it was about Hurricane Katrina, I was confused. To be honest, I did not know that Hurricane Katrina had anything to do with race. The only negative things that I heard about Katrina (besides, of course, the terrible damage that it did) was that the government took a long time to respond. When I learned about the hurricane in school, the ...

The OJ Simpson Trial and Race

Alexa — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:11:41 +0000

When we recently read the Johnson et. al article, the main thing I kept thinking about was the OJ Simpson trial. As many of us known, OJ Simpson was accused of killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and one of her male friends in 1994. There were many factors that made this trial of the most well known and controversial. One one side there was compelling evidence against him including, OJ’s past domestic violence issues ...

Trying To Get Rid of My Bias

Keith — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:04:38 +0000

Last week, I wrote about how the challenges of this class extend far beyond anything that can be explained on a syllabus, and this week I suppose is more of the same. However, what I’ve been struggling with this week, or rather the past couple of weeks, is the comment Jordan had heard and brought up in class. The specific comment, which I believe she said was made by a fellow student in another one ...

What Would You Do?: Racism in America

Alexa — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 21:26:34 +0000

The Macrae experiment that we read in class this week, (Stereotypes as energy-saving devices: A peek inside the cognitive toolbox) found that the use of stereotypes is actually a cognitive tool our brain uses. In the study, whenever a stereotype label was present (regardless of whether the stereotype label was present consciously or unconsciously) participants remembered more stereotype consistent words and performed better on the additional task than participants who were not provided with a ...