What Grand Jury Decisions Say About Racism in the U.S.

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Alexandra Nguyen |Contributing Writer

opinion@fiusm.com

If Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths and the failure to indict the officers who killed them serve to be a legacy for one thing, it must be that they were the catalyst to an awakening of the reprehensible racism in the United States. We do not live in a post-racial society, and the mistaken notion that we do lends to the frustrating tendency to have to prove otherwise, especially in the wake of tragic injustices such as these.

There is no denying that these tragedies are multi-faceted and contain many shades of transgressions, such as police brutality, the need for law enforcement reform and lack of minority representation in many areas across the board, all of which point to a legislative and judicial infrastructure that contributes to systemic oppression. These are all important issues which we, as a society, must address and include in our dialogue when discussing Mike Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths.

For those who claim that the United States is a society where racism is the exception and not the rule, consider the following statistics: The Bureau of Labor Statistics cites that as of December 2014 10.9 percent of blacks were unemployed, the highest out of any ethnic group. Poverty rates for African Americans are the second highest out of any ethnic group (25.8 percent) after American Indians, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A study by Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander further reveals the economic immobility that accompanies poverty. Alexander’s study found definitive differences when it came to race and economic mobility such as 89 percent of white high school dropouts having a job by age 22, compared to 40 percent of their black counterparts. Black male prisoners account for 37 percent of the male prison population in the United States, a disproportionate number considering blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. In her book, “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander points out that the high rates of black men in the prison population coupled with the laws enacted against convicted felons (losing the right to vote, to public housing, to welfare, and access to education) are merely another form of institutional racism.

Michael Brown and Eric Garner are more than just anecdotal examples that mean little about racism in the United States. There is a reason why a black man in Walmart toting a BB gun around the store is viewed as a threat and shot and killed by police, while a group of white men heavily armed with rifles at a Chipotle are considered humorous and somewhat outrageous, however, not dangerous.

This is not to say that race relations have not improved throughout the past few decades since the Civil Rights movement. They have. Nevertheless, improvement does not mean total resolution. Racism today means more than individual prejudice. A more accurate definition of racism in the United States today encompasses and identifies the residual effects of the historical oppression of minority groups which are so ingrained into our institutions that they manifest themselves on an individual level, such as the Michael Brown murder and lack of indictment of the officer who shot him.

Any attempts to view racism in the United States through an inaccurate lens means stagnation and failure for further progress in order to achieve complete success with regards to improving race relations altogether. Recognizing there is a problem is the first step towards correcting it. Michael Brown and Eric Garner, as well as their families, deserve it.

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