Racism Must Stop
Courage under fire. The ability to stand up for your beliefs in the face of adversity. Having the wherewithal to succeed where others have failed. All very noble ideas and every human being on this planet should strive towards making these statements a reality. In a kinder, gentler world, everyone would succeed in whatever they wished to accomplish. But the world can be very cold and unforgiving. There has to be a problem when having a different skin color is all it takes to enrage somebody and cause detrimental and often times violent outcomes.
I had a friend, nameless in this story due to pending court proceedings, who grew up in a bad neighborhood. He was a straight-A student, a generous person, and a very dear friend. One evening, after coming home from internship, my friend gets off the bus and begins to walk the five blocks to his house. According to eyewitness accounts, a six-year-old African-American boy was run over by a drunk driver, consequentially another African-American. The only two witnesses were an eighty-three-year-old woman suffering from Parkinson's disease and a wheel chair bound Vietnam veteran, both unable to do anything but call the cops. When my friend saw the boy lying in the street, he went to the boy and attempted to help him. It was the last decent act my friend ever had the chance to do.
After checking the boy out and not finding a pulse, my friend began to run down the street towards a payphone to call for help. A group of seven African-Americans, both males and females, allegedly saw my friend just as he was running away from the little boy. They chased my friend down before he could get to a phone and beat him senseless; thinking it was him that hurt the...
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Racism is wrong and hating people for the color of their skin is wrong. My friend lived most of his life being called "whitey" and being excluded from the people in his neighborhood, simply because he wasn't the same as the majority. These things shouldn't matter but they obviously do. The sacrifices my friend made cost him his life, but by convincing his parents to donate his organs, I helped save a little boy and several other fellow human beings.
Above all else, I feel no hate or resentment towards any particular group of people, not even the ones that took the loving, caring person my friend was away from us. I feel genuine pity for them or any other racists. To live in our modern world and exclude or hate other people for such inconsequential idiosyncrasies is both archaic and monotonous. To hate someone is to hate yourself. Enough is enough.
Throughout, the documentary one can come to the conclusion that most of these African- Americans who live in this area are being judged as violent and bad people. However this is not the case, many of them are just normal people who are try...
Imagine this: Summer break has finally kicked in and a couple of kids has decided to throw a pool party under adult supervision. The kids are munching on finger food, drinking sodas, and hanging out with their friends. Suddenly a fight between a child and her mother breaks out, and the neighbors call the police. Once the police arrived madness in the neighborhood erupted. One cop in particular began to terrorize the black children, curse at them, pulled out his gun, and manhandled them in a way that is unbelievably violent and sickening.
From the summer of 1979 to the summer of 1981, at least twenty-eight people were abducted and killed during a murder spree in Atlanta, Georgia; these killings would come to be known as the Atlanta Child Murders. While the victims of the killings were people of all races and genders, most of the victims of the Atlanta Child Murders were young African-American males. These murders created great racial tension in the city of Atlanta, with its black population believing the murders to be the work of a white supremacist group. (Bardsley & Bell, n.d., p. l) However, when police finally apprehended a suspect in the case, they found it was neither a white supremacy group, nor a white person at all; it was a 23 year-old African-American man named Wayne Williams. (“What are”, n.d.)
This is a true story. It happened to my African American cousin. He was innocent by all means, but someone felt threatened by the color of his skin and the way he appeared so much that their first instinct was to call the cops. Mass incarceration is based upon the institutional discrimination that black and brown men face each and everyday. My cousin’s first instinct was to stay calm, don’t seem guilty. He knows the threat that was placed on him by that officer, and whoever called the cops on him. He knows being a black man in the U.S Means having a target on your back on any given day. He could have resisted and question the police, as that’s his right to ask first, but like many stories of when black men are innocent and question authority,
“We must come to the point where we realize the concept of race is a false one. There is only one race, the human race.”(Dan Aykroyd) In this day and age people are constantly being influenced on how to treat others based on color. In “ Black Men and Public Space”, by Brent Staples, he suggests that African-American males are treated poorly due to racial discrimination. Judging the unknown, that is what we as humans seem to be doing now instead of getting to know the person first. However, sooner or later we have to realize in order to create a future worth living for we must stop and come together as one.
In America, police brutality affects and victimizes people of color mentally and socially. Social injustice has become a major issue, which involved the principle of white supremacy vs minorities. The current police brutality that has been occurring is culturally disconnecting ethnicities from one another. According to Cincinnati Police Chief Jeffrey Blackwell, “…the cultural disconnect is very real; you have the weight of generations of abuse on African Americans,” (Flatow, 2016). For example, over the past four years, there have been countless acts of police brutality. The three key deaths of Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling have become the face of police brutality in the year 2016. People knew that it was unequal treatment of black people by police in the United States and they made it known by creating #BlackLivesMatter.
A local stationmaster was told the “attack” by the white hobos that had been thrown off of the train. This stationmaster wired ahead to the next stationmaster to let him know of the situation. As the train slowed down and came to a stop in Paint Rock, Alabama, those that were accused of the future crime had no telling what they were going to be up against. Once in Paint Rock, 9 black youths were rounded up, tied together and taken to prison in Scottsboro Al. Here the boys were placed in a jail cell awaiting their charges. Little did they know an additional charge was going to be added that never even crossed their minds.
Much like the adage, prevention is better than cure many African American parents hoped to prevent an incident in which their child would be disciplined by America. In this attempt the parents would make certain that their child is disciplined beforehand. The method used was physical discipline, a lower wrong than the discipline of America. While reminiscing of the first time his father disciplined him physically, Coates recalls that “Maybe that saved [him]. Maybe it didn’t” (16). As a child one cannot fully grasp the gravity and pain of a parent beating their child. It is only once Coates becomes a parent himself that he understood the complexities of being a parent of a child of color. Coates articulates, “Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra— ‘Either I can beat you or the police.’ I understood it all… Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have and you come to us endangered” (82). Coates, now an adult understood both the love and fear in which his father had when beating him. Additionally, Coates, from his experiences in his childhood understood the growing up as an African American male in America is dangerous and unforgiving. Police brutality is the strong arm in which America uses to discipline young African American teen who fail to comply with their requests. Cooper makes note of this use of brutality by America when she discusses the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson. Cooper
First let’s answer the question, what is racism? A full definition of racism according to Merriam-Webster.com is a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race (2014). Every difference from the upper class, the ruling, class, the group that holds the money and power, is a stratifying call to lower class identification. Racism has been practiced throughout human history and is still used as a way to justify unequal treatment and enslavement of many groups of people. Racism provides the reasons for denying access to social status and cultural capital; and promotes segregation to lower classes by maintaining the idea that other people are less equal.
Dating back to the beginning of times people have always been looked at different depending on the color of their skin or what your religion, race, or beliefs may be. It is in our human nature to not like people for certain things that they are. Many will argue that in this day in age we are no longer at a race war but how can you be so sure when you actually open your eyes and see reality. Rapper Kanye West once said “racism is still alive, they just be concealing it” and these words are everything but false. You must ask yourself the real question about racism and it is how could you ever cure such a thing in people’s minds? People are free to think and believe what ever they would like and old habits such as racism will never change in people.
In 2014, the death of Eric Garner in New York City raised controversial conversations and highlighted the issues of race, crime, and policing in neighborhoods that tend to be poor and racially isolated. Garner, an unarmed black man, was killed after being tackled and held in a “chokehold.” According to the AP Polls in December 2014, “Police killings of unarmed blacks were the most important news stories of 2014.” The problem is that young black men are targeted by police officers in which they have responded with the misuse of force and policy brutality. It is evident that this issue affects many people nationwide. The civilians do not trust the police department and the justice system because they hold the perceptions that police officers are immune from prosecution despite their actions. In particular, black individuals, specifically black males, do not feel safe in the presence of police officers because they are not held accountable for their mistakes.
Racism is defined as the belief that one race posses something better or more superior than another race. Racism and Racial Discrimination has been around for 2 Centuries. It started off in medieval times. Often rulers would be Prejudice or would have Racial Assumptions point toward a peasant because of his/her appearance or wealth. From there slavery took over. During MOST of the 19th century, and all of the 20th century, slavery ruled. If you were “colored” a termed used for African American, you were thought of as less than trash. African Americans faced 4 of the 7 most common types of Racial Discrimination. They faced Prejudice, Racial Assumptions, Harassment and Systematic Racism.
This year there's been a lot of brutalities. In fact, there have been at least 500 people killed by the police officers this year. In this article, we are going to be talking about police brutality against African Americans. We are also going to talk about the differences and similarities of different cases that have been in the news this year. For example, the Sandra bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and the Walter Scott cases. Also, we're going to talk about how these cases have affected the African American community.
To begin with, frustration is a very common cause of racism. If one is having some sort of a social problem, they tend to get very angry with people who are not even concerned with their situation. For instance, when a person is having a tough time economically, they find it easy to blame immigrants for taking away their jobs or creating fewer opportunities (Abanes 1992,12-15). This type of an analysis is very easy to make but when one makes this assumption, it usually leads to hate towards any minority group. The psychological factor is also common disturbance that is found as the root of racism. People with tough childhood may sometimes produce anger and hate towards others (Hayes 1995, 4-5). This kind of person is inclined to dominate others as these qualities attract to racism because of the way racism divides the world into superior and inferior. In these types of situations, one can only picture of what might go through the heads of such individuals. However, in some cases aggravation is only created by the mental thought. Change is a particular device that people cannot handle at all times. People are more comfortable around the recognizable and they find it hard to adapt to a culture that they are not familiar being with. Since 1987, Chinese have been settling in Vancouver, as the suburb of Richmond went from one in twenty to one in three of its residents being Chinese, in two decades. This rapid change was not acceptable for many people who moved out for that very reason so they can live in a “white town” again (Rupet 1996,13-15).
Race is a subject that consumes the mind of many different people. Although race is very important in our everyday lives, it shouldn’t be something to hate people over. Whether you are Black, White, Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, German, Italian and many different, ethnicities, different cultures should be celebrated, not judged. Many great and admirable people have lost their lives fighting for equality. It’s unfortunate that many great people continue to die to this day, except they’re dying because of LACK of equality among races. It’s very sad to admit the fact that people can hate others over the color of someone’s skin, or the land that someone was born on. I believe everyone can all benefit and use great things gained from the customs and culture of each different race.