Black Psychology
The mission of policemen in America is to "serve and protect," but if one reviews the recent history of the police force across the country, one is forced to ask: who is doing the protecting? Africans in America are far too often the victims of police violence, and very infrequently the beneficiaries of it. The police force exists as part of the distorted view of life given to us by the ruling elites. At the root of this twisted unreality is a social system based on economic and racial control. The police force itself is not an inherently evil thing, just a tool to enforce this control. Their effectiveness in maintaining this control would be far less effective if the ideologies underlying the control where not in place. These ideologies are multi-faceted; I will merely bring out a few here. The first is the ideology of blaming the victim, which is the subject of a book by the same name. Blaming the victim holds, quite innocuously it seems at first, that people ought to be held personally responsible for their actions. The logic goes: if you commit a crime, you ought to suffer the consequences. Secondly, the social order defines what "crime" is. Most often criminal behavio
r has little to do with absolute standards of justice and more to do with who has the money to justify and sanitize their illegal behavior. White-collar criminals engage in far more heinous behavior without getting caught than the criminals who commit muggings, theft, or drug sales. Thirdly, criminalization of certain behaviors has racial undertones-the overwhelming public perception of crime is linked with people of color, most specifically black males. In our popular imagination, crime is inextricably linked with the poor and black. Their activity, indeed their very existence, is criminalized. This criminalization and restriction is its own kind of violence. The police merely serve as the foot soldiers in this maintenance of the social order-the courts, prisons, and schools are other facets. They selectively enforce the law, in, it has been revealed, a systematic attempt to control racial or economic groups. It is not adequate or accurate to attribute high crime rates to decaying social conditions. The police are engaged in a brutal war against poor black people. Outbreaks of violence among policemen are not merely a side effect or unfortunate consequence of law enforc
Some common words found in the essay are:
Amadou Diallo, Africans America, , Rodney King, police force, Similarly NYPD, oppressed communities, blaming victim, poor black, violence police, law enforcement, police violence, apprehend criminal, crime rates,
Approximate Word count = 794
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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