Racism Today

Racism is one of the major issues in the world today, it plays a big role in the United States Justice System. There has been many unjustified cases due to an individual’s race. Defendants convicted of killing whites were more than four times more likely to receive the death penalty than those convicted of murdering blacks. (Constitutional Rights Foundation) Study proved that juror and judges discriminated against African-American defendants. Black defendants were 1.1 times more likely to receive the death penalty than the white defendants. 78 percent of the death penalty defendants are black, 11 percent were white, as well as Latino. (Constitutional Rights Foundation)

African Americans are counted for more than a third of the arrest for violent

If it were, we would be well on our way to a more just world. But to have an honest, adult conversation about race, people might need to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, ashamed, fearful, angry, overwhelmed, helpless and/or paralyzed, because there are few issues that grip and affect us emotionally more than the issue of race. (Massingale) Michael Brown Jr. was killed on the streets of Ferguson, Montana. That summer ignited a series of protests, epitomized by the slogan "Hands up. Don 't shoot." But Michael Brown was simply one of many-all too many people who were killed unarmed African-Americans, men and women, killed for doing nothing except shopping in a mall, ringing a doorbell in the middle of the night to ask for help, or sitting on a playground swing and playing with a toy gun.

Person A, usually but not always being white, does something negative deliberately, consciously and intentionally to Person B, who is usually but not always black or Latino, because of the color of Person B 's skin. It is obvious, it is deliberate, it is intentional and it is easily photographed. You know what you are doing and why you are doing it. Now this kind of racism is a problem. But it is not the problem. (Massingale) This understanding of racism makes it easy to conclude that racism is simply a problem of bad white people, like the ones who marched in Charlottesville. But the issues with this common-sense understanding are twofold. First, it does not take us deep enough into where we need to go; and second, it can too easily let many white Americans off the hook.