Imagine constantly waking up every morning and you turn on the television and look at the news you see that an unarmed black man was gunned down and killed for no unnecessary reason? This is the reality that the black community has to endure every day, knowing that it has become a type of norm for everyone in society today. Racism has endured all through the ages and over the course of time it has been broken to make the world more equal for everyone to live and prosper. Residing now in a society where racism is nowhere it was 50-60 years ago people who are still that way hide it or just show different forms of it.
Racism thrives through a very subtle approach now, and a major form of that is how unjust our criminal justice system is with how they handle race. The black community is aware of this and so is the system but they just turn their heads to these social issues that need to be dealt with hoping people forget about it down the line. This is topic needs to brought up and talked about multiple times because people need to be informed on this issue. I want to inform you on how being a black man is tough due to the trials and tribulations that they go through on a daily. I have done extensive research on this topic along with having my own personal background of being a black man growing up in today’s society.
Many factors have contributed to this unfair justice system that we deal with today, people being a product of their environment also, media justifying racist acts, and finally a principal cause is ‘black lives matter’ being portrayed as a hate group. We know racial acts still take place but when we have the evidence to fight against it, the court deems it unjust allowing the cops or the defendant to walk away free with no justice being served thus making our court system unjust.
As a black man growing up in a racial environment it can heavily play a part on undercover racism today because people automatically stereotype in a certain low- class category. Nevertheless, we as people need to start asking ourselves why it is that people who have taken an oath to protect us are the very ones hunting us or why people that we eat, drink and use the bathroom like despise us so much. In old pictures of lynching you could see little kids there watching as they put the black man on the noose and hang him up for all to see, and if they see mommy and daddy do it, then it must be the right thing to do.
The cycle of racism began like this because it was being passed down from generation to the next taught at a very young age. In the article by Claudine Rankine, she states ‘Dylann Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He has grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism. He has seen white men like Benjamin F. Haskell, Thomas Gleason, and Michael Jacques plead guilty to or be convicted of, burning Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass., just hours after President Obama was elected’ (Rankine, 2015). This is a huge problem because you have people like Dylann who are brought up in a certain environment that have role models or older figures who they watch do things that inspire young people like Dylann to do the same all because of what they see growing up.
With criminal-racial acts like these that are clearly wrong happening, the justice system somehow finds a way to end it in their favor. It is unfair when you have people like Dylann who was molded in an environment of hate against another race and when you as a black person look to be protected they try to downplay the acts of this individual thus leaving you to feel like your life does not really matter. The justice system has different ways of twisting the story into making the victim seem like bad person instead of the defendant and a huge way they do this is through the mass media.
Media consistently controls the news to justify criminal racial acts for the public view so that they can have a different outlook on the actual situation that took place. So, when the verdict finally comes out and it is in favor of the defendant the public will not really feel that because victim was some of criminal or thug. Throughout the years, we have had notable killings that have received a lot of social attention like the Trayvon Martin case or the Dylann Roof case. The hugest thing that both these cases have in common is that innocents were slain due to gun violence.
When the case with Trayvon Martin surfaced the media regularly displayed images of him on the news and websites that would dehumanize him so that people could develop this horrible image of him. The media already had their accusations, but they posted these pictures and other things just to help add fuel to their claim. Furthermore, when Dylann Roof did his criminal-racial act, the media outlets labeled him as a ‘disturbed young man’ when really the man was just a racist out to kill black people because of his upbringing and hate for black people. In the article, by Smiley, C., & Fakunle, D. they said: ‘The exploitation of these often-targeted victims’ criminal records, physical appearances, or misperceived attributes has been used to justify their unlawful deaths.
Despite the connection between disproportionate criminality and Black masculinity, little research has surfaced on how unarmed Black male victims, particularly but not exclusively at the hands of law enforcement, have been posthumously criminalized’ (Smiley, C., & Fakunle, D., 2016). This shows media uses their power over the public outlet to downplay the lives of black people in the press so that the public can see. That way when the courts rule against the victim, then it will not be as bad because they have shown things the help that image.
