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 …
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 …
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 …
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. 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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …