Race and Crime May as Well Rhyme

  Race and Crime May as Well Rhyme

 When the words ‘race’ and ‘crime’ are heard together, it triggers different topics and feelings for different people. Unfortunately this is because these words have all too much to do with one another, and it varies by experience and privilege. Whatever race that one is identified as can have a huge impact on where they live. Where you live has an impact on the resources available to you. Those who lack these resources, in turn, can be more likely to partake in crime. This is an ongoing social cycle that many are unable to see, especially those unaffected by it. So we can look at the concept of mass incarceration and wonder why minorities make up close to 65% of imprisoned persons. Is it because most minorities are innately bad seeds? Some believe so, and try to support it with scientific evidence. Yet others looks at the flaws in the United States justice system, and take into consideration facts such as how Black offenders receive sentences about 10% longer than Whites. One issue brought up in my Sociology: Racism and Ethnicity class was that the penalty for pure cocaine is about half that of crack cocaine. Perhaps the courts feel that the baking soda mixed in with freebased crack is more detrimental than cocaine in its purest form (I mean that in the most sarcastic way possible). I think, here, that the people who are handling and using each one needs to be examined. You won’t find too many Blacks that transport, distribute, let alone use pure cocaine. For those that don’t have a general understand of drug creation and use, compare it to being in more trouble for having a vodka cranberry than straight vodka, if hypothetically more minorities drank vodka cranberry. These facts are just small examples of how our biased system of laws keep minorities inferior, more so than protect our equal rights. I think one of the most recent examples of this we’ve seen is the Trayvon Martin case. For those that may have heard the name but not the basic details of the case, a White-Hispanic man claimed he mistook an unarmed 17 year old African American boy as a threat, and shot him. The evidence in favor of the prosecution (Martin family) piled up and seemed very promising. Yet, Florida state law wouldn’t allow this guilty man to be convicted of not one crime. There are so many underlying factors that went into the verdict of this case and could be discussed all day. Yet this case was an enormous blow to the face of not just the Martin family but myself and most African Americans. It was often compared to the story of Emmett Till who didn’t receive justice for his murder in 1955, and here we are, 58 years later after years of supposed progress, finding ourselves in an all too familiar situation. It is my hope that it won’t take another 58 years for the United States to address and resolve the flaws in the justice system that hold so much weight on the two words ‘race and ‘crime’ together.

1.    1.  http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2012/03/13/11351/the-top-10-most-startling-facts-about-people-of-color-and-criminal-justice-in-the-united-states/

2.     2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/trayvon-martin-case-evidence