Racism in the Justice System

Josephine Barren

Brenda Wolfer

English 101

October 9, 2014

Racism in the Justice System

African Americans in the United States face a radically different reality than white people when it comes to fairness in the judicial system. Black people receive different treatment than whites. Black Americans have come a long way from slavery but still have a long way to go. The Trayvon Martin and Michal Brown cases are excellent examples that prove this point. White people make up the majority of the population and illicit drug users but a greater percentage of black people are in prison than them.

The Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect on January first of 1863 (The Emancipation Proclamation, n.d.). This bill was passed to free the African American slaves but they have been fighting for their freedom since then. At the time, however, there were many laws prohibiting the freedom of the African Americans. These laws were sometimes referred to as the “Black Codes”. Blacks were not allowed to marry whites or even testify against them in court. They also received harsher punishment for crime which was usually death penalty. This was rarely the case for the whites. There was segregation of schools, bathrooms, restaurants, and other public places (The Southern “Black Codes” of 1865-66, 2014).  The one of the main arguments at this time about segregation claimed that they were “separate-but-equal” even when they were clearly not (Brown v. Board at Fifty: “With an Even Hand”, n.d.). African Americans were not allowed to vote until 1870, and even then there were more barriers put into place to make it harder for them. Of these barriers there was: the grandfather clause, which allowed people vote if their grandfather or father voted before 1867, literacy and property tests, and fees or taxes. All of these obstacles made it harder for the black man to vote (Brooker, Russell G., n.d).

No matter what laws were passed there was still animosity in the society at the time and there were unwritten laws and norms. These were the Jim Crow laws. This included a certain “etiquette” for black people to follow in public. Some of the things they were not allowed to do with white people included: Shaking hands, eating, offering to light cigarettes, having the right of way when driving. The rules were even stricter when it came to white women because they could risk being accused of rape. The white people regarded the blacks as inferior and lesser citizens (Pilgrim, David, Sept. 2001).

This went on all the way up to the civil rights movement which took place in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. This act officially declared discrimination against race, religion, disability, age, gender, etc. illegal when it came to “hiring, promoting, and firing” a person (Teaching With Documents: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, n.d).

  The overwhelming majority of America’s population is white, 77.7% to be exact. That is 77.7% of 316,128,839 which is 245,632,107.903 people. Only 13.2% of the population is African American. The approximate number of African Americans in America, based on the 2013 census, is 41,729,006.748, respectively. For about every seventeen black people there are one hundred white people (State & County QuickFacts, July 2014).

Of the 2.3 million people incarcerated, one million of these people are black, according to NAACP. Black men are more likely to be incarcerated than white men. More white men are using illegal drugs than black men, but black men still have a higher chance of being incarcerated. Black men also spend just about as much time in prison for a drug offence as white men do for committing violent crimes. (CRIMINAL JUSTICE FACT SHEET, 2009-2014). Once black men are convicted, they are sentenced for longer times than white men for the same crimes, averaging at about 10% longer (Kerby, Sophia, Mar. 2012).

Racial profiling, when a person is suspected of a crime because of their race, is unconstitutional because the Constitution states that every person is under equal protection of the law. When being pulled over by the police, blacks were more likely to get arrested and whites were more likely to be let off with a warning, according to CivilRights.org (The Reality of Racial Profiling, 2014).

To take it a step further, based on statistics from 2012 census, black people make up 32.9% of the people in Chicago and 91% of the people killed by police, black people make up 28.6% of the population in New York City and 87% of the people killed by police. In Rockford, Illinois and Saginaw, Michigan black people make up a fraction of the population and 100% of the people killed by police (Walton, Frank V., Aug, 2014).