DEINDUSTRIALIZATION AND CRIMINALIZATION

BY STUDENT

In American history there has been many instances that the minority have been treated less than equal. After everything the truth is that even after fighting for equality there is still a clear division between whites and those of color. People of color are often categorized within their stereotypes, they are categorized into these ideas that are viewed mostly negative than positive than whites, and most of all they harm the chances they can get in the future. The fact is that the color of your skin matters. Why does the color of one’s skin matter so much when judging a person? Why is it that when it comes to a person of color they are deemed more prone to failure and incarceration than a white person who is let off easily or not prone to crime as easy? In this blog post I argue that Hispanics and African Americans share the same experiences of criminalization of unfairness which can be seen in the New York City area. 

Crime in the New York City area is something that is heard of constantly, in the news or actually seen when walking through the streets. When we hear of crimes we hear of them mostly being Latinos or African Americans that are the ones being accused or jailed. We rarely hear of whites being accused of a crime or convicted in the news, we hear about them when it is something big. When it comes down to it when you are colored it matters, it matters because once they see that the person is either Hispanic or African American immediately the person is stereotyped and labeled. It is a horrible thing but even after fighting for equality throughout the years in America it is still a judgment that people have in which they/we are born into. The ethnicity, gender and socio-economic status are things taken into consideration when people judge and treat us. Police are not an exception to this, just because they have to power to enforce the law on us civilians, it is not a hundred percent without racially profiling the person. Even in the 20’s and 30’s African Americans have focused on the discrimination within the districts where people of colored have lived from the police, they have seen “mounting evidence of police corruption, misconduct, and violence against African Americans supported a powerful counterargument to the longstanding linkage of black crime rates and moral, cultural, or racial inferiority” (Muhammad 2010). This is even occurring now, more predominantly with Hispanics and African Americans because we as a society have been primed to think that these ethnicities are the ones to cause more crime than whites.

When looking at the 2015 year end enforcement report of NYC, one can see that the African Americans and Hispanics are accounted for the majority of the crimes. The majority of the NYC area are the minority, they are the most dominant along with their culture. When we think of the city, we think of crime especially within some neighborhoods. New York City used to enforce a stop-and-frisk program that the police department used which would racially profile people to crimes that their race would be labeled to do. This program has since 2013 stopped being considered unconstitutional, but the racial profiling is a very real thing that the correctional system imposes. “Many observers noted that city officials had become more tolerant of crime in African Americans communities than in white ones” (Muhammad 2010). It is very obvious that nothing from the 20’s and 30’s has changed, today police base their judgement on color and on the area the person is from to inforce the law on them. For the most part whites live in the suburbs, an area where crime rarely occurs, and people of color live in the city where often they do not live in the “rich” areas. Hispanics and African Americans are more likely to be arrested than whites even for minor offenses and are charged. People of color have an unfair impact based on their skin color which stereotypes and affects the justice they receive in the correctional system. It is important that the country notices that a person’s race labels them and is detrimental because of the negative impact it has on how they are judged within the correctional system. If a person is treated as a criminal because of their race and its stereotype, they will always live in that shadow and never break out of it. No one should solely judge a person based on their skin tone, everyone should be treated with equality within the justice system and not based on stereotypes or labels.

Work Cited:

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.