scholarly journals Systemic Racism, Police Brutality of Black People, and the Use of Violence in Quelling Peaceful Protests in America

2020 ◽  
pp. 224-262
Author(s):  
Williams C. Iheme
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Sustainable Solutions ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Face ◽  
Initial Inability

The Trump Administration and its mantra to ‘Make America Great Again’ has been calibrated with racism and severe oppression against Black people in America who still bear the deep marks of slavery. After the official abolition of slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, the initial inability of Black people to own land, coupled with the various Jim Crow laws rendered the acquired freedom nearly insignificant in the face of poverty and hopelessness. Although the age-long struggles for civil rights and equal treatments have caused the acquisition of more black-letter rights, the systemic racism that still perverts the American justice system has largely disabled these rights: the result is that Black people continue to exist at the periphery of American economy and politics. Using a functional approach and other types of approach to legal and sociological reasoning, this article examines the supportive roles of Corporate America, Mainstream Media, and White Supremacists in winnowing the systemic oppression that manifests largely through police brutality. The article argues that some of the sustainable solutions against these injustices must be tackled from the roots and not through window-dressing legislation, which often harbor the narrow interests of Corporate America.

Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gun Carrying ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hero Archetype ◽  
Gun Culture ◽  
Black Panther

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

scholarly journals Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings

Public accommodations—hotels, trains, restaurants, steamboats, theaters, buses, motels, and the like—were for more than a century located at the epicenter of legal and political struggles for racial equality. From the age of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, civil rights in public places stood alongside voting rights, school integration, and equal opportunity in employment and housing as conditions that black people and their allies claimed as necessary attributes of a just society. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Supreme Court rulings in theCivil Rights Casesand especially inPlessy v. Fergusonwere critical episodes in the career of Jim Crow in the nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth by the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Assesing the Roles of Race and Profit in the Mass Incarceration of Black People in America

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-185
Author(s):  
Williams C. Iheme
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Black People ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Humanitarian Crisis ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Cash Crops ◽  
Key Players ◽  
Human Labor

Shortly after the alleged discovery of America and its vast expanse of land waiting to be cultivated with cash crops using cheap human labor, millions of Africans fell victims and were kidnapped to work as slaves in American plantations for about four centuries. Even though it has been over 150 years since the official abolition of slavery in America, the effects of the 400 years of enslavement continue to reverberate: irrespective of the blackletter rights protecting Black people from injustices, the deep racist structures typically decrease the potency of these rights, and thus perpetuate oppression. This article assesses the roles being played by race and profit in the administration of criminal justice: it deems the systemic oppression of Black people as a humanitarian crisis and seeks to ascertain this by interpreting the attitudes of the various key players in the American Criminal Justice System, the majoritarian population, mainstream media, and Corporate America: it challenges some entrenched racist practices suspected to be the umbilical cord that links Black people in America with mass incarceration.

Moving Beyond Racial Fortuity

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Law School ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
The Face ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
School Issues ◽  
Primary Mission

Agospel Song Asks: “What do you do when you’ve done all you can and it feels like it’s never enough?” The answer, “Just stand,” seems so passive, but as interpreted by those who framed those words out of the difficulties of their own lives, it means to keep on, to not give up in the face of seemingly fruitless struggle. It draws on a necessary maxim of the oppressed: to “make a way out of no way.” Those of us who have labored for decades in racial-justice campaigns can identify with that gospel lyric, particularly civil rights lawyers whose primary mission was trying to desegregate school systems. The school issues of today grow out of societal conditions that affect educational efforts across the economic spectrum. They can’t all be laid at the doorsteps of Brown’s failure, but looking back over the decades, I wonder whether the long school desegregation effort was an unintended but nonetheless contributing cause of current statistical disparities that some critics angrily attribute to the continuing effects of racism. Others, not all of whom are white, assert with equal vehemence that blaming failure on racism is an excuse; that we need to get up off our dead asses, drop the welfare tit, stop having “illegitimate” babies, and find jobs like everybody else. More objective observers of black distress view the source as the lack of employment, the bedrock of survival and success in this society. In the post–World War II years, racial reformers felt that gaining racial equality would eliminate the barriers that underlay the economic disparities between blacks and others. While a powerful symbol, the call for equality was easier to make than for a great many blacks to realize. Just as the Brown decision in 1954 did not open up law-firm jobs when I graduated from law school in 1957, the hard-fought liti­gation to erode public manifestations of segregation meant little to those black people far less fortunate than I as they looked in vain for openings in schools, jobs, and housing.

Working together to survive and thrive: The struggle for Black lives past and present

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097620
Author(s):  
Herbert G Ruffin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Black People ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Revolutionary Period

This article examines Black leadership through the generations as a multifaceted struggle for Black lives led by ordinary Black people working together to end anti-Black violence and systemic racism for the affirmation of their humanity. At the center of this examination is the latest phase in a long struggle for Black lives, which has been branded as a Black Lives Matter movement. This new movement for social justice developed from past struggles and during the aftermath of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, 2014 Ferguson uprising, and 2020 George Floyd uprising. For the author, this new struggle is Black Americans most recent “walk of life” that stretches back to the movements for self-determination, anti-enslavement, and civil rights during the American Revolutionary period (1764–1789). Central to this new struggle is the blending of nonviolent direct action tactics with the use of digital technology and the inclusion of people who previously functioned on the margins of the civil rights agenda. This struggle is addressed, first through an exploration of where Black-led community organizations have been since Trayvon’s death, and second, by examining what is currently being done during the aftermath of the death of Breonna Taylor up to mid-September 2020.

Papa

Race & Class ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 030639682110109
Author(s):  
Brenda Burgo
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black People ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Severe Injuries ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Permanent Brain Damage

In this personal narrative, the author details her grandfather’s and father’s experiences of police brutality in Los Angeles, a pattern that continues from one generation to another. She shows the long legacy of violence and racism that Black men face at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department – from her grandfather Roy Wyche, who was beaten so badly in 1974 that he sustained permanent brain damage, to her father who suffered severe injuries after being wrongly suspected of a crime in 1983. These stories, she argues, are common occurrences that are part of a long history of injustice and systemic racism that Black people continue to face in the present day.

scholarly journals Becoming a Yam: Healing Narratives as Political Resistance in the Time of COVID-19

Genealogy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Latoya B. Brooks ◽  
Kareema J. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Social Emotional ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Healing Narratives

COVID-19 created a crisis that forced people to deal with the social, emotional, personal, and interpersonal impact of the virus in the United States. Simultaneously, Black people continued to be murdered and victimized by systemic racism and social injustice. Choosing wellness, self-recovery, and self-care during the global pandemonium surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an act of political resistance in the face of oppression and violence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the authors’ embodied uses of personal narratives centering the work sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, feminist theory, and African-centered social work paradigms as coping strategies and healing work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

From protests to practice: Confronting systemic racism in LIS

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Renate L. Chancellor ◽  
Paige DeLoach ◽  
Anthony Dunbar ◽  
Shari Lee ◽  
Rajesh Singh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
National Response ◽  
Real Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

The death of George Floyd, at the hands of the Minnesota police on May 25, 2020, sparked a global uproar that many have argued has not occurred since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It is unclear why this particular incident elicited such a visceral and widespread response, especially in light of the fact that police brutality towards Blacks in America is not a new phenomenon. This paper examines the national response to Floyd’s death within the contexts of CRT, the history of systemic racism in the United States, and questions how race and inequity issues have been addressed in LIS. The authors provide actionable measures that could go a long way in moving the discipline toward a shift in thinking. However, they find that these efforts need to be sustained, because one-shot events, training sessions, or activities rarely result in any real change. Real progress, they conclude, will require more than new laws. It will also require a seismic societal shift in attitude.

scholarly journals Black, White, and Blue: Bias, Profiling, and Policing in the Age of Black Lives Matter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridgette Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Communities Of Color

Published: Bridgette Baldwin, Black, White, and Blue: Bias, Profiling, and Policing in the Age of Black Lives Matter, 40 W. NEW ENG. L. REV. 431 (2018).The United States has experienced a series of murders at the hands of the police in recent years, from Michael Brown to Tamir Rice to Eric Garner. The brutalization of Black people at the hands of the police is not new, but many are being introduced to the concept of police brutality through the channels of social media. Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #TakeAKnee have revolutionized the conversation about racism and policing, bringing these incidents into mainstream media and common conversation. This movement has led to a deeper discussion on the following questions: (1) Why are Black people viewed as violent by the police?; (2) Why are these murders and acts of brutality being seen so regularly?; and (3) What has the criminalization of communities of color done to damage the public's perception of Black communities? This Article attempts to answer all of these questions, coming to the conclusion that while the police brutality of Black people is not new, our understanding of why these incidents occur has developed into a deeper understanding of the institutional racism behind police brutality.

Activist Respectability and the Birth of the “Jim Crow Car”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
The State ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Standing Up ◽  
The Moment ◽  
White Violence

Chapter 3 identifies the moment when colored travelers launched a movement in earnest. The movement took off in the late 1830s and early 1840s, when segregation on the Massachusetts railroad turned brutal. In part, this was because steam-powered passenger railroads were new. It was also because the president of one of the foremost Boston railroad lines created a novel invention, a separate car to carry black people and the poor. Rail road workers in Massachusetts dubbed the space the “Jim Crow car.” It was a method of racial control that institutionalized segregation as no method of transportation had before. In keeping with the criminalization of black mobility, the railroad directors not only insisted that people of color ride in the dirty, cramped spaces, but officials also employed conductors who served as enforcers and routinely beat, kicked, and ousted colored travelers who attempted to ride in the first-class car. To activists, standing up and risking white violence in the name of equality became a mark of black masculinity. In a strategy that continues to buttress civil rights protest today, colored travelers held the state accountable by turning to the courts for redress.

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