Week 8

This week’s articles followed the trend of continued racism in institutions of law enforcement and imprisonment in the US. The first articles I read were about violence against Native Americans and the #sayhername. These articles were about bringing to light the unfair treatment that so often goes unpublished in popular media, against native Americans and women of color. A lot of the time, it seems, a certain face is assigned to a certain type of violence, and that marginalizes other groups who still experience violence. We see this with the rates of incarceration and police shootings parallel in Native American and Black populations while the face of violence against people of color is always black. As a result, or possibly a cause, of these issues is increased rates of substance abuse, suicide and lowered access to education in Native American populations. One of the articles gave good insight into this by taking a look at the PIC in indigenous California and how native Americans and especially NA women faced and continue to face poor treatment and in some cases downright abuse. The author talks at length about how she was drugged into sleeping all day, only going outside to go to court. Essentially the government was controlling every aspect of Native American life, yet again. This makes itself evident by the fed sticking their nose into Native Americans affairs and doing things like arresting native Americans for fishing on their own land. This unfair system of imprisonment shows itself for other races as well, namely African Americans. The way the article explained it the time just after the civil war was just about the same as the time before. The laws had changed to allow black people to be free so somebody had to think of a way to lock them up again. As a result, many new and often discriminatory laws were established to unfairly target blacks and bolster the southern system of free labor after the emancipation proclamation. That may seem like years and years ago, and it was, the tree may be dead the roots still remain and were seeing evidence of that today.