Yeah, Oppression is a Problem

The main oppressive theme in TKAM is racial issues, so I am going to talk about those and how they still happen today.

First lets start with some facts about racial discrimination in America nowadays (see more facts here):

• In 2010, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported that African Americans receive 10% longer sentences than whites through the federal system for the same crimes.
• The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics concluded that an African American male born in 2001 has a 32% chance of going to jail in his lifetime, while a Latino male has a 17% chance, and a white male only has a 6% chance.
• After being arrested, African-Americans are 33% more likely than whites to be detained while facing a felony trial in New York.

All of these clearly show white privilege and harsher punishment for people of color. This is shown in TKAM as well, because when Tom is on trial, he is put in jail because of his skin color. The jury thought that this overpowered the evidence, and I suspect that this is the case in some of today's arrests too. Also, police pull over non-whites more, because they are more "suspicious looking," so I'm sure a lot of whites don't even get questioned about their actions whereas POC are frequently asked even when they are doing something harmless.

An example of this in the news is this article that explains that seven black passengers were kicked off of a plane because of racial discrimination. A seat was double booked (by a white man and a black man), and the black man was accused of being disruptive for not giving up his seat. The flight attendant labeled him as a threat and asked him to leave the plane. Six bystanders stood up for him, because he didn't do anything wrong, and they were all kicked off of the plane. All of them were black.

I have a lot to say about this. First of all, the airline should've dealt with the double booking beforehand, and the flight attendant (who was white) should have handled it in a more respectful manner. Secondly, because there was nothing wrong with what the man did, I don't think that the other people deserved to be kicked off either. The fact that the black man was expected to give up his seat for the white man reminds me of when blacks had to give up their seats for whites in buses, and that doesn't sit well with me, because we are just taking a whole bunch of steps backward when we should be moving forward.

The police said that the airline was allowed to kick off passengers, but I think that it was at least partially due to their skin color and not their standing up for someone.