“Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are portrayed as the purveyors of violence, traffickers of drugs, and as envious of commodities that they have no right to possess. Young black and Latina women are represented as sexually promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating babies and poverty. Criminality and deviance are racialized.”
—Angela Davis
Excerpt from “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex”
Honour student who works two jobs to support her siblings after her parents split up and left town is put in JAIL for missing school due to exhaustion
bit.ly- Diane Tran, 17, thrown in jail for one night because of repeated absences from school
- Honours student has been working two jobs to keep family afloat since parents’ divorce
- Has been taking advanced placement and college courses in addition to jobs and missed school due to exhaustion
- Spent the night in jail for truancy
Petition for the decision to be overturned here
**EDIT** Update to the story here
“Currently in the legal system there's this myth of equality. And the assumption is if you are over 18 and you have an IQ of over 70 then all brains are created equal. And, of course, that's a very charitable idea but it's demonstrably false. Brains are extraordinarily different from one another. Brains are essentially like fingerprints; we've all got them but they're somewhat different. And so by imagining that everyone has the exact same capacity for decision-making, for understanding future consequences, for squelching their impulsive behavior and so on, what we're doing is we’re imagining that everybody should be treated the same. And, of course, what has happened is that our prison system has become our de facto mental health care system. Estimates are that about 30 percent of the prison population has some sort of mental illness. ”
—neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of Incognito
So they’re charging Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in federal court as a criminal defendant, so he’s not an enemy combatant, meaning he gets a trial, an attorney, no indefinite detention, etc. (Despite him being Muslim and being charged with using weapons of mass destruction.)
So please tell me more about how he doesn’t get white privilege.
“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Monday condemned racially charged language used by a federal prosecutor in Texas. The justice, appointed to the court by President Barack Obama in 2009, took the relatively unusual step of writing a statement to accompany the nine-member Supreme Court's announcement that it would not take up a criminal case. Sotomayor took issue with the unidentified prosecutor who, while questioning an African-American defendant in a drug case, asked: "You've got African-Americans, you've got Hispanics, you've got a bag full of money. Does that tell you - a light bulb doesn't go off in your head and say, this is a drug deal?" The first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor wrote that the prosecutor had "tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation." The question was "pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence," she added. Sotomayor also accused the Obama administration of playing down the issue.”
—Lawrence Hurley, “Sonia Sotomayor Condemns Prosecutor’s Racially Charged Question,” Huffington Post 2/25/1310 Facts Everyone Should Know About New York City’s ‘Stop-And-Frisk’ Policy
1. In 2011, NYC officers made 685,724 stops as part of the “stop-and-frisk” policy. Of that group, 605,328 people were determined not to have engaged in any unlawful behavior. [NYCLU]
2. Only 5.37% of all stops in a recent five-year period resulted in an arrest. In short, many people stopped did nothing wrong. [NYT, 5/17/12]
3. In 2009, 36% of the time officer failed to list an acceptable “suspected crime.” Reasonable suspicion of a crime is required to make a stop. [NYT, 5/17/12]
4. More than half of all stops last year were conducted “because the individual displayed ‘furtive movement’ — which is so vague as to be meaningless.” [NYT, 5/14/12]
5. Of those frisked in 2011, a weapon was found just 1.9% of the time. Frisks are supposed to be conducted “only when an officer reasonably suspects the person has a weapon.” [NYCLU]
6. 85% of those stopped were black or Hispanic even though those groups make up about half of NYC’s population. [NYT, 5/17/12]
7. Young black and Latino men account for 4.7% of NYC’s population but 41.6% of the stops in 2011. [NYCLU]
8. The number of stops involving young black men in 2011 (168,124) exceed the city’s population of young black men (158,406).[NYT, 5/15/12]
9. Even in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, police stopped more blacks than whites.[NYT, 5/15/12]
10. In 2012, police are on pace to make more than 800,000 stops, more than twice the population of Miami. [NYT, 5/15/12]
