Michael Brown's Role In The Criminal Justice System

The murder of Michael Brown is not a matter of individual racism or discrimination, it is the result of the racist institutions maintained in this country. The protests seen in Ferguson, which have been ongoing since Michael Brown’s murder in August, are a retaliation against the institutional racism that plagues disadvantaged neighborhoods and is pervasive among nearly all aspects of life. Michael Brown’s death has become both a moment of reckoning for the Ferguson region and a national rallying cry against the inequalities faced by young black individuals. Lauryn Hill describes “Black Rage”, a song she dedicated to the people of Ferguson, as an effort to “raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten, and inspire in ways the democratic
The racial hierarchy in the United States is routinely reproduced by the actions of government agents, especially police officers (Sola, 2014). Police officers have historically played a major role in the subordination of blacks and still do today (Feagin, 2000, pp. 147-152). Slavery was maintained through the enforcement of acts of intimidation, subjugation, and violence (Sola, 2014). Much like how black bodies were subjected to the whims of white slave masters and slave patrols, black bodies today are subjected to the whims of abusive police officers. There is hardly a difference between slave patrols of then and police officers of today in regard to black individuals. They do not exist to protect black citizens, but rather to hunt them down through profiling, harass through taunting, intimidate with numbers, embarrass through frisking and ultimately kill with weapons or disenfranchise through incarceration. Through policies like stop and frisk and racial profiling, police have efficaciously been able to continue terrorizing black neighborhoods in legal ways. Racial discrimination in criminal justice is rampantly widespread as demonstrated by proliferating police brutality and murder, racial profiling, the war on drugs (and all it entails such a mandatory minimum sentencing, three strike laws, mass incarceration, powder and crack cocaine
Blacks are inherently proscribed a lack of moral personhood and rationality, correspondingly creating the association between blacks and criminality (Sola, 2014). This way, blacks do not need to participate in criminal activity to be perceived as criminal, their blackness does the work on its own (Sola, 2014). In “Black Rage”, lines such as “Deafening silence and social control”, “Black rage is founded on dreaming and draining; Threatening your freedom to stop your complaining”, and “Old time bureaucracy; Drugging the youth; Black rage is founded on blocking the truth; Murder and crime; Compromise and distortion”, Ms. Hill addresses the battle black individuals confront when engaged with the criminal justice system. Police subsist under the façade of those who protect citizens but in reality and practice they work to protect white citizens from