The United States has systemic racism problems that need correcting. Systemic racism means the system is flawed with racist undertones. The United States laws and practices give greater priority to one race over another. Opponents of this theory deny its existence explaining the issues to be poor individual choices. The President of the United States signed Executive Order 85 FR 70419 on Thursday, November 5, 2020, denouncing government structured racism. The Executive Order states the Nation is great from founding fathers to today’s “heroes and warriors of freedom”. A small outlier group is said to attempt to tarnish this history by bringing up racial and sexist injustice. The following is an excerpt from the Executive Order.
“As one example among many, theoretical frameworks like “Critical Race Theory” have corrupted our United States history and civic education courses in public schools, board rooms, the military, and government agencies, promoting racial division and discrimination. Adherents to Critical Race Theory and other associated ideologies believe that America is an inherently racist and sexist country, defined by oppression and hierarchies of victim-hood, rather than freedom and equality. Critical Race Theory and those who promote it seek to strip individual agency from all Americans and instead relegate them into per-determined categories of belief based on their racial or sexual identity. If Americans are distracted by such theories from studying the true history of our great Nation—its mistakes and its triumphs—we risk the dissolution of our common bonds and we will be weakened as a country. That is why I recently signed an Executive Order that bans executive departments and agencies and Federal contractors from teaching Critical Race Theory, in an effort to prevent the indoctrination of the American people by these dangerous ideologies. Now, more than ever, we must continue to forge an even brighter future for our Nation by preserving its past. As President, I will always honor the great legacy of America’s history and its Founders.” (President Donald J. Trump)
President Trump states teaching black history, slavery, and its effects, is tantamount to brain washing our youth. A Commission will create patriotic educational curriculum painting this country in a great light rather than putting “black people’s problems” in the center of who we are as a nation. However, it is not “black people’s problems”. It is US citizens treated unfairly by the system meant to protect their rights. US Citizen indoctrination has closed our eyes and our minds to the point we cannot identify our beliefs from reality without more education and understanding. This article explains the problems we have regarding law and applied justice about black and brown skinned people.
We were taught that great white men of the past are fathers of this country. However, twelve of these great men owned slaves and eight men during their time in office. Forty-one of the fifty-six Declaration of Independence signers owned slaves at the time they signed the accord. From 1776 to 1865, Africans and African descendants were considered chattel. Congress ratified the 13th Amendment December 1865.
Note: Kentucky waited to ratify this amendment until 1976, 200 years after the declaration of independence. Mississippi ratified it in 2013 after initially rejecting it.
The amendment gave the appearance of the end of slavery, but simply caused the practice to emerge in another form. The 13th Amendment contains, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”, creating an opportunity for convicts to be enslaved. The book, “Slavery by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon details the use of convict leasing to provide cheap labor to the cotton plantations as well as iron mines and steel factories primarily in the south. US Steel, made rich by convict labor, denies being part of the system although ownership of Pratt Mines is evident. Pratt Mine was notorious for using convict leasing through contracts on record with the State of Alabama. Thousands of convicts died in the Mines and were buried in makeshift graves over the hill from the mines entrance. Convicts were convicted of minor or made up offenses as defined under Jim Crow “Black Codes”. Green Cottenham, a convict in 1908, was arrested for vagrancy for simply walking down a street and being of strong body. He died in the Mines after four months. (D. Blackmon, July 16, 2001, WSJ). “Black Codes” allow plantation owners to find a black person suited for hard work and summon a sheriff to arrest him. Law officials were in business with the plantation owner and each received financial benefit. The black person would be tried, convicted, and face a fine too high for him to afford. The plantation owner would pay the fine and the convict required to work off the fee by becoming a ward of his master’s charge for some undetermined amount of time. Convict leasing became popular through out the south thus supplying an abundance of slave labor to the labor-intensive cotton industry.
Today, the for-profit prison system mirrors the earlier convict labor system. According to the Sentencing Project, adding a profit incentive to mass incarceration deflects the justice system from public safety to corporate gain in a similar fashion as convict leasing. Governmental laws and campaign promises have made this demographic the targeted prison population thus continuing enslavement.
President Nixon created a hate campaign by declaring the war on drugs in 1971 listing people of color as responsible for the illegal drug trade. This war declaration allowed him to pour resources into the legal and justice systems to combat what he saw as his greatest enemy: antiwar left (Hippies) and black people. Nixon knew the public would vote for him if he was tough on crime and eased their minds on safety issues. Advancing mandatory sentencing for drug crimes and support no-knock warrants helped accomplish that goal.
President Regan added to Nixon’s campaign adding Anti-Drug Abuse Act that provided $1.7 billion to fund the War on Drugs focused on urban cities. Part of the law placed longer mandatory sentences on crimes involving crack cocaine than on crimes involving powder cocaine. Crack cocaine was cheaper and mostly in intercity impoverished neighborhoods and powder cocaine expensive and found in affluent county neighborhoods. Patrols stayed in the “hood” furthering the oppression on minority neighborhoods.
January 2017, President Obama reduced or eliminated sentences for 1385 individuals with minor, non-violent, drug crimes. He pushed to permanently eliminate differences in sentencing, but it did not pass Congress.
During the 2020 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump addressed Obama-era-fair-housing initiative requiring government to address racially segregated housing areas. In attempting to appeal to suburban homemakers, Trump said, “I will keep low income housing out of your neighborhood because, with it, your homes will go down in value, and crime rates will rapidly rise. People have worked all their lives to get into a community, and now they’re going to watch it go to hell. Not going to happen, not while I’m here.” Singing the same song developed and recorded during “White Flight” depicts the racial injustices that plagues this Country.
Two well established justice system policies, No-Knock Warrants and Stop and Frisk techniques, disproportionately target African American communities violating their 4th Amendment rights. The 4th Amendment states, “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
No-Knock warrants allow police officer to enter a house without knocking or announcing themselves. This policy utilizes a surprise attack to give criminals a disadvantage. Widely used on suspected drug offenses, it often results in property damage, injury, death of a family pet, or even a child. Breonna Taylor’s case is an example of a no-knock warrant gone wrong. The police came in the dark of night. Pounded on the door and forced their way inside. A shocked occupant picked up a legally purchased gun and used it to defend themselves in the dark. Breonna Taylor, unarmed, was shot six times, and died at the scene. No drugs were found in the house and she did not have any records of possessing or distributing drugs. However, judgement was cast on her with the initial issue of the warrant and a death sentence was handed out when the police delivered it to her door. The police officers serving that warrant were free of any charges related to her death. Why? Because they were following laws that allow this treatment to be used.
Stop and Frisk techniques allow police officers to stop anyone looking suspicious and search their body, property, or vehicle at will. In the case of Terry v Ohio, in 1968, the US Supreme Court ruled that police could stop and search any citizen based on reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed. This law allows for the interjection of personal bias. In New York City alone, NYPD officers made over 700,000 stops in 2011 according to the NYCLU, a branch of the ACLU. The following is an example of how the stop and frisk law has been used.
A young black man is driving to work as he usually does this time of day. A police car follows him for about three miles, giving the police enough time to call his license plate number in to check particulars. His orders are to utilize stop and frisk techniques whenever he sees something suspicious. When skin color causes suspicion, a young black man always looks suspicious. The police officer calls in the intended vehicle stop and is soon joined by two other police vehicles. The young black man pulls over as required, gets out of the car upon request, puts his hands on the roof of his car as ordered and is searched and put in hand cuffs and told to sit on the curb or the ground. He is watch by one of the officers as the other two search the car. The reason given for the stop is a burnt-out taillight. After the police finish with the car having found nothing, they remove the cuffs and issue a warning ticket for the taillight letting the man continue his way to work. The police were doing what they should have been doing under the law, what they were trained to do. However, racial profiling undermines self-esteem and eliminates trust.
Along with No-Knock warrants and Stop and Frisk techniques, Stand-Your-Ground (SYG) laws allow for openly racial acts to be condoned by law. The SYG law allows people to use deadly force if fearing for their life. Florida was the first State to approve SYG laws. According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the application of SYG homicides is not disproportionate between whites and blacks. However, the number of Court decisions of justified homicides varies by race. The following is a table from Percentage of Homicides Ruled Justified, Martin Case Attributes, 2005 – 2010 found in the Commission’s “Examining the Race Effects of Stand Your Ground Laws and Related Issues from February 2020. This table is based on related factors in the Trayvon Martin case: single shooting victim, single shooter, both male, strangers, and a firearm used. The column on the left shows shooter’s race verses the victim. The next column is the percentage of cases by race. The next two columns are statistics for both States that recognized SYG and the states that do not. The overall rate of justified homicide is higher when the shooter is white, and the victim is black. The difference is almost 33 percent between the races.
Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American young man, was unarmed when George Zimmerman killed him on February 26, 2012 in Sanford Florida. He was walking home from a convenient store after purchasing an Iced Tea and some candy. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, called 911 from his SUV stating he saw someone who looked “very suspicious and could be on drugs because it is cold and rainy, and he is just walking around with a hoody on”. He had already called the police five times that day with the same complaint. George was told to stay in his vehicle and wait for the police. Instead, he followed Trayvon who was on the phone talking to a friend. His friend said that she heard someone saying, “where are you going?”, then Trayvon said, “why are you following me?” There was a scuffle and then a gun shot. Trayvon was shot in the left chest. George said he feared for his life and invoked the “stand your ground” self-defense upheld in Florida. George did many things wrong that night. He did not follow the 911 operator’s instructions; he had already called 911 four times that evening on other African American walking in the neighborhood; he did not identify himself to Trayvon as a concerned neighborhood watch volunteer. George was charged with 2nd degree manslaughter but was able to avoid conviction under the self-defense/stand-your-ground law. (Fulton, S & Martin, 2017). Trayvon was killed without witnesses. People heard a commotion, called 911 but no one saw what happened, except for George Zimmerman. Under the Stand-Your-Ground law, the shooter needs to state that they had a reasonable belief that they needed to use the force to save their life. George Zimmerman said he used force because he feared Trayvon would kill him. However, when you look at the facts, the story does not match the situation. Here are key facts: George was carrying a concealed weapon and Trayvon was unarmed; Trayvon’s hand lacked wounds consistent with a fight; George’s DNA was missing from Trayvon’s body; the scrapes George’s head were not consistent with wounds that would have appear if George was on the ground, straddled by Trayvon as he “smashed” his head against the ground. George changed his story several times before going to court. The Court sided with George and found Trayvon Martin guilty of his own death. One must ask, however, why did Trayvon get the death sentence when he was simply standing his ground?
In conclusion, Systemic Racism is defined through the application of laws if not the verbiage used in creating it. No-knock warrants and stop and frisk techniques are used primarily in the war on drugs where black and brown people are viewed as the enemy. Coupled with the fact that Courts are 33% more likely to rule a homicide of a black person by a white person as justifiable homicide proves that the US system is racially motivated regardless of what the President thinks. Racial profiling singles out and paints the color of crime in the Society’s mind to the point people accept and excuse the use of force, deadly shootings, and police brutality when used on black and brown people. Nine out of ten deadly force cases where police have killed or injured a black or brown man were ruled as justifiable. Our system is broken. Our minds need to change. We need to unpack what we see and strive to change our thinking. This flawed system needs to be corrected.
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