Who Is Emmett Till's Murder?

Many people have heard of eugenics, but they might not know that it is the catalyst for racism as we know it today. Eugenics is “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable,” according to a Google search of the word. The idea was to improve the human race through selective breeding and other methods. Many believed in these ideas as well as Social Darwinism, which took Darwin’s theory of evolution and related it to humans. The main idea was the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which essentially meant that the people who become powerful in society gain that power because they are innately “better.” Both of these concepts have been proven to be

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy who was on vacation in 1955 when a white store clerk accused him of whistling at her. This has not been proven. According to fbi.gov, he “.was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, had a large metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire, and was thrown into the Tallahatchie River.” As could be surmised, he was killed. His body was found and an investigation was opened, and “Roy Bryant [husband of the “victim”] and his half-brother J.W. Milam were accused of the murder, and an all-white, all-male jury acquitted both of them.” Both of these instances show how much of an impact the concept of race has had on American society. A young black boy was killed with no justification and in such a heinous way. There is no possible way racial prejudice did not play a part in this. This is a classic instance of white woman tears, where a white woman feels unfoundedly victimized by a person, often a man, of color, and cries and acts significantly distressed, though nothing happened to her. A book called “White Tears, Brown Scars” by Ruby Hamad explores this, and a quote from that book exceptionally explains this situation, “White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to

Tamir Rice was an innocent 12-year-old boy who was killed by a white police officer on November 22, 2014. According to Stanford Libraries’ Say Their Names exhibit, which explores black victims of police brutality and their stories, “Two officers responded to a police dispatch call reporting that there was a male pointing a pistol at random people in the park. The 911 caller explicitly stated at the beginning and the middle of the call that the pistol was ‘probably fake.’” This information was not relayed to the responding officers, though. The exhibit proceeds to explain the events of his murder: “Tamir was by himself, playing in a gazebo when two police officers pulled onto the grass right alongside the gazebo. One officer shot the sixth grader immediately, within three seconds, after arriving on the scene. As the caller had surmised, the gun that this little boy had was indeed just a replica toy gun.” His mother was threatened with arrest because she was yelling at the police to let her rush to her son’s aid, and his 14-year-old sister, who was able to make it to him, was arrested. She was placed in the same squad car as the officer who killed her brother. Instances like these have happened far too many times, where there is no logical explanation for the actions of white people besides the