The state of Black life in Canada today is the outcome of long time neglect, abuse, violence and surveillance; which all started with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Policing Black Lives is a book written by black feminist writer Robyn Maynard. Her book tells the stories of Black life and experiences in Canada, addresses a multitude of issues, and shines light on the harsh realities faced by the Black community due anti-Black practices and views. This book holds a complete account of hundreds of years of criminalization, punishment and surveillance by the State of Black lives in Canada. My overall impression of the book was that it was very well written, interesting, and extremely shocking.
The Murder of the Hollywood Starlet A young hollywood starlet was brutally murdered in 1947 with no killer identified to this day. This is real case that still puzzles investigators today. The woman in question was named Elizabeth Short, but is more widely known as the “Black Dahlia.” She was given this nickname by the press because of the sheer, black clothing she tended to wear (“The Black Dahlia Murder - Read All about it in FBI Records.”).
Even just by reading pages 5-12, I can tell that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a good writer because his essay is highly thoughtful and provocative, and the well-written narrative provides lots of powerful examples to depicts the racial struggle in the U.S. He told his son, “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regression all land, with great violence, upon the body.” The concept of violence upon the body appears on every important point of my reading. This is more powerful than the examples of law enforcement and black Americans because it leads the reader to truly see the the fears provoked.
In my poem “Silence,” I attempted to broach a few of the prevalent issues affecting American culture regarding police brutality that has been widespread throughout the country as of recently. Using Sor Juana’s “Poem 92” as inspiration, I aimed to emulate her poem structure, and style of using Juvenalian satire. While I feel that my poem met a portion of the criteria to be considered Juvenalian satire, I believe that my poem lacks the strong ironic humor necessary to completely be considered as true satire.
We are living in a world where the erasure and dehumanization of people of color is slowly becoming a normative. Voices silenced, struggles trivialized, deaths becoming statistics, brutality only brought up for shock factor, achievements hidden and it is all slowly becoming accepted. Through various rhetorical strategies Claudia Rankine illustrates the experience of being part of the marginalized identity in the United States and depicts how subtly and multifaceted the methods of oppression take place in the daily life are and the negative repercussions it holds on the individual. The ambiguity of her writing with the lack of punctuation and clarification of what is thought and what is aloud allows the readers to input their own interpretation of these various scenarios.
In the essay titled “Police Brutality”, Danna Hernandez uses rhetorical devices to declare that police brutality is dreadful. She utilizes anecdotes to support her claim, pathos to persuade the audience to agree with her argument by producing an emotional response, and imagery to illustrate her hardships caused by police brutality. Danna does this in order to make the general public realize that police brutality is a significant issue that should not be treated as a trend. Danna Hernandez uses anecdote to support her argument. The vast majority of the essay is an anecdote that tells of the tragic death of her son due to unjustified gun usage by a police officer(which constitutes as police brutality) and the emotional consequences that followed.
Being honest with you, in my opinion, they forget about us” (84). The idea of the story never ending can correlate to the establishment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 questioning whether it is actually being fully enforced and articulates segregation has not ended and still presides to be an issue. As the author of Citizen, Claudia Rankine is able to collect information firsthand and although she has had extraordinary experiences they are by no means an easy stroll through the park. Even though it is not directly stated, she is faced with many challenges having the capability to take a toll on her mentally. How so, you may ask.
Both Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Frederick Douglass’s narrative draw many similar parallels between the systematic oppression of black people in modern times and in the 19th century. The scenes of police brutality in 13th especially reflects Douglass’s influence on DuVernay’s perspective. In these scenes, we see black people violently, and sometimes fatally, attacked by the police, who are meant to protect people. This random violence against the black community leads to an overwhelming sense of fear and distrust of authority. This fear mimics the fear Douglass felt when he witnessed the Captain’s cruelty during the scene of Aunt Hester’s torture in Douglass’s narrative.
Although the concluding source of passing is ambiguous, one thing is perfectly and apparently discernible, that the premise of the unearned detention was from not extinguishing her cigarette as directed by Texas State Trooper Encinia after he halted her for not indicating a lane change. While casually perusing social media, one can readily unearth her final discourse fervently and passionately proclaiming that if Caucasians connect in the plight to preserve and cherish black lives, a necessary revamping of the enormously biased judicial system would transpire. As the arresting state trooper forcibly mishandled her, she affably expressed gratitude to a concerned, alarmed eyewitness for capturing that calamitous confrontation with the pugnacious and irascible state trooper. Hence, she was a strong and formidable advocate for the utilization of cellular phones and social media as catalysts to affect societal changes and effectively immobilize police brutality. Furthermore, some believe police officers silenced this once powerful activist indefinitely in that prison compartment, because from the initial encounter with the arresting officer and until her incarceration, she vocalized persistently with obscenities her rudimentary constitutional rights as a citizen.
Are you, as a witness of the atrocity, culpable for the brutality, set forth by police? It is so what author, professor, and attorney, Bryan Stevenson, believes. The following is a quote from Bryan Stevenson’s novel, Just Mercy: “We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation;” (source book). This is not a matter of racial discrimination, but rather an ethical dilemma covering the iniquity of the nation’s proposed peacekeepers.
Claudia Rankine a renown poet, uses her novel “Citizen: An American Lyric” to discuss issues of race and imagination. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of poetry and uses her gripping accounts of racism, through poetry to share a deep message. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. Not only is this poetic novel a vision of her world through her eyes, Rankine uses the experiences of Americans whose color has rendered them invisible to the many who are privileged enough to be blind and not note racism as a large issue in America. Claudia Rankine articulates the use of you and further emphasizes the larger meaning of the title Citizen and recognizing that word through societal issues.
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a hybrid and communal text constructed out of varying poetic form accompanied by contrasting imagery, and historical events. Rankine, although the author of this text is not necessarily its narrator. She plays with prospective, switching the fundamental meaning of “you” and pulls from the personal experiences of her friends, colleagues, and surrounding community. Rankine is able to incorporate “an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in [her] writing”, blur the line between various genres, and “[reject] … elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist design”, which are the pillars of postmodern works (Klages). She utilizes historical and modern events such as the Jim Crow laws, affirmative
The photograph of the “Attack Dogs,” reveals the unethical treatment protesters experienced from the Birmingham police department as they were attacked by their highly trained and dangerous dogs, while they were fighting for equality and human rights. The image displays an attempt by the white police officers to show authority, dominance, to create fear, and suppress any efforts of the Civil Rights Movement’s activists, as racist sentiments were extremely encrypted among many individuals in the South. Life magazine was considered by segregation supporters as extremely liberal and biased, yet the photographs that were published in Life magazine were so real and shocking that resulted in high support for the activist
As a human being, this practice unnerves me, specifically because it is something that has been progressively getting worse, especially due to the growing tensions within the United States. On the other hand, however, Adichie’s message is also one filled with hope and encourages overarching change. Towards the end of her presentation, Adichie states, “…Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” (Adichie, 2009).
Having been aware of police brutality, growing up many of us saw what was going on the television or hear politically charged music. From memory, when I was a teen listening to Rage Against The Machine, this type of music gives me a voice. At the time, when the Rodney King beating occurred, the city of Los Angeles became a literal war zone. We are introduced to Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith. When I first looked at the structure Smith uses in this book I was skeptical, because I have never read books with this style.
