PB3A

I chose an article called “Race and Crime Sixty Years After Brown vs. Board” which talks about the way in which the bill was passed and viewed is a huge step within our society however, there still remains many prominent racial issues in our society nowadays that perpetuates racism. The article spends a lot of time talking about the presence of African Americans in our prison system as well as the effects of the high incarceration rate. The article touches on the fact that though racism is a topic that is addressed by politicians and society little progress has been made to ameliorate the situation and instead we are stuck in a place where we are just having the same conversations over and over with no resolution. The article then goes on to talk about African American presence in the crime rate (including homicide and drug cases) as well as the way in which they are continuously and unjustly profiled by the police. The underlying message of the article was that in order to “visualize redemption for each of us, we will never fully realize redemption for all of us.”

For my WP3 I was planning on my first ‘transformation’ to be an article from the perspective of a black student’s union, I researched one in particular called the Afrikan Black Coalition which was an organization created by black students in the UC system who were striving to create a place where they could come together and address the relationship between the University system and their Black students. The Coalition has a blog where they post articles regarding on campus student protests, interviews of various African American students (high school and college level), as well as articles about police violence/just violence in general direct towards African American students in the community. I was planning on writing an article that would be about the protests of the death of a young African American Male University student that resulted from racial profiling by the police and the community. So something from the perspective of students within the African American community reacting to the death/racial profiling of another African American student in their community. I decided to pick something from this perspective in order to write something that addressed current African American youth’s perspective and reaction to the demographics given by the scholarly article regarding the incarceration rate of African Americans and also the way they are profiled by the police.

For my second ‘transformation’ I was planning on replicating a police report which would be from the perspective of the police officer responsible for the death of the African American college student and would also include a “narrative” which would be a summary of the where/what/when happened the night the incident occurred from the perspective of the police officer but also from the information that was relayed to him when he received the reporting from a citizen in the community. The reason in which I was planning on doing it from this perspective is to show racial issues from the perspective of a white male police officer and the way in which (in this case) the police officer will be conforming to the facts about the relationship between police and African Americans exemplified in the article. Since the article made references to the fact that since the demographics of African Americans to white people in suburban population is 10% to 70% which accounts for an increase of profiling in suburban areas I was planning on incorporating the suburbs as being the location of the African American youth during the time of the event.