Mississippi Trail Today Analysis

A nation that is known as the “melting pot” and that is supposed to be a nation of equal opportunity has a major problem. The United States of America is supposed to be the gold standard of the world. We have always been told than anyone from anywhere in the world can come to the United States and reach the goals and become successful. However, the America we live in today is a very different one than we are lead to believe. The United State of America has a major racism problem. Minorities in the United States are treated unjustly. Whether its having less opportunity or being treated unfairly in our criminal justice system. We have made many strides to equality in America, but we are far from where we need to be. The novel “Mississippi Trail,

Like in the Mississippi trial, minorities of today are often treated unfairly in trial. According to the NAACP, in their article, Criminal Justice Facts Sheet, “About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African-Americans report using an illicit drug. 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as Africa-Americans, yet African-Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites”. This would mean that for the same drug offences, African-Americans are being put in jail at 10 time the rate of whites. The fact that African-Americans are being incarcerated at 10 times the rate of whites for the same offences, proves that there is racial injustice in the US judicial system. So those who say that the reason there are more minorities in prison because they commit more crimes is just wrong and not factual. Minorities are in fact imprisoned more for the same offences. Even though there are less minorities in the United States they make up more than 60 percent of the United States prison

A majority of these police brutality cases are towards minorities. A majority of the police force across America do a phenomenal job protect citizens. However, now that everyone has a phone with a camera we have been able to uncover a major problem. Police brutality is now easily captured by someone with a phone and is spread across the internet allowing for the entire nation to see, resulting in anger by many civil rights groups and Americans. An example of this is when a black man, Eric Garner, was choked to death by police. This scene was recorded on someone’s phone and released for the public to see, showing what happens all over the country in these police brutality cases. There are many cases like that of Eric Garner. In the article, The Management of Police Killings, the authors Sid Harring, Tony Platt, Richard Speiglman & Paul Takagi point to the fact that “If the correction factor is added to Takagi’s study, black males were killed by the police at a rate 13 times higher than for white males and not the nine to 10 times rate previously reported” (3). This would mean that black men are being killed by the police far more than white men. Also, this study only takes into account police brutality that results in death. There could be many more cases of police brutality against black men that have not been taken into account during this study because they didn’t result