The local news story that I am using to relate to the events in TKAM is called "The Racial Reality of Policing". The article was published on September 4, 2015, and written by a Police Officer living in New York.
The article starts out by explaining a certain instance in a training class. There were two white cops and two black cops. The instructor put two white cops pretending to hold guns to one of the black cops who was holding his hands up. He asked what the class thought it was. They responded with "arrest or stop". When they switched the roles, having two black cops pretend to hold guns to one of the white cops, the class said it looked like a mugging. This is extreme racial profiling, it really shows how appearance and race affects the way people see a situation.
In another part of the article, it also explains a different situation that had happened way back in 2009. A black New York cop named Omar Edwards was shot and killed by a fellow officer (white of course). Edwards was out of uniform, and had pulled a gun and chased a man who had broken into his car. That's when the white cop shot him.
All of this is oppression towards black people. Without even knowing a background or a story, a class asserted a situation just by the race of the people involved. A white cop killed another black cop when he didn't know the whole story, just assuming by his race and what he saw. Would he have shot if it was a white cop?
This relates to TKAM because everyone accused Tom and assumed he was guilty just because he was black. If Tom had been white, he would've definitely not been found guilty. Also, Tom got shot in the book as he was trying to escape from jail, since he was wrongfully found guilty. He was shot seventeen times. The black cop in the article also got shot wrongfully, just because of his skin color. This makes me so angry that race can affect situations so much. It makes me mad because if both Tom or that black cop were white, they wouldn't have been shot and killed. What should've happened is that the jury should've listened to the evidence and taken it into account fairly, instead of being biased because of skin color.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-racial-reality-of-policing-1441390980Ellie out.
The use of the connection between the cop and Tom strengthens your ideas, and the article is interesting too
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ReplyDeleteInteresting and sad how race altered that classrooms decision on the situation.
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