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Monster is a novel about a young man who is accused of murdering a man even though he did not commit the crime. It is a first person narrative from Steve Harmon, our main character, writing. Steve is going through the trial writing about it as a screen play as if it were a movie. Steve is a 16 year old teenager. He is black and is discouraged that almost everyone including his lawyer and family think he is guilty. Steve is eventually found innocent, but when he looks in the mirror all he sees is a monster. He is not even sure whether he committed the crime or not at this point.

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“The problem we all live with”Norman Rockwell

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“The problem we all live with”Norman Rockwell

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The painting is a painting of Ruby Bridges going to school with a police escort. Tomatoes are seen thrown at her as well as the “n” word written on the wall behind her. Ruby was six years old in 1964 when this painting was made during the civil rights movement. Ruby, similar to Steve, was legally allowed to join the public, but there is no doubt she felt alienated or like a “monster.”

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Lillians’s right to vote Jonah Winter and Shane Evans

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Lillians’s right to vote Jonah Winter and Shane Evans

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The elderly Lillian climbs a hill to vote for the first time. As she climbs she recalls the history of her family and African-Americans in her country and all it took to get to this point. These texts show that while we have come a long way as a nation Steve still suffers the consequences of systemic racism from the times these texts were made.

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He could've been the champion of the world.

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He could've been the champion of the world.

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Bob Dylan performing the song “Hurricane” The song is about an african american boxer who was sentenced to prison because of a crime that he did not commit. We see again how race plays a factor in these decisions.

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Shown are four unarmed young African American men that were brutally murdered by police officers. In each of these cases, the police officers were set free with no punishment.

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The article talks about how a black person was given an extremely harsh sentence and treated unfairly for petty crimes. Ramad Chatman was 19 when he stole a $120 TV and was sentenced to 5 years probation. He complied and even stayed employed during his 5 year probation. He was then wrongly accused of a separate crime that he was found innocent of. The judge then retracted the probation and sent Chatman to prison until 2022. This is just another real life example of how people of color are treated unfairly in this country. This is especially true in the court system.

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In today's example of how the American justice system treats black bodies, we take a look at Ramad Chatman, a 24-year-old man who was found not guilty by a jury of his peers but will serve seven years in prison because ...

Come on, you know why. Read the first two words of the headline again.

According to The Independent, in 2012 Chatman was convicted of breaking and entering for stealing a television worth $120. It was his first offense, but because he was-again, you know why-Chatman was sentenced to five years' probation. You read that right. He was 19, and a judge thought it necessary to make him property of the state for half a decade.

During his probation period, court papers show that he paid his restitution, attended every meeting, finished his community service and even kept himself employed.

Unbeknownst to Chatman, he was identified as a suspect in a convenience store robbery in 2014. Although he was on probation, which means that he was required to submit his whereabouts to law-enforcement officials monthly, Chatman was never arrested for the robbery. In fact, according to him, he had no idea that he was a suspect.

In 2015 Chatman learned that he had been accused of the crime, so, like most thug gangsters who need to be removed from society for the safety of the good citizens, Chatman did what any criminal would do after evading law-enforcement officers for a year: He turned himself in. Chatman said that he only turned himself in for the crime because he knew he was innocent.

But Judge Jack Niedrach wanted to send Chatman to jail.

That's not just hyperbole. When he was arrested, Chatman offered to plead guilty to assault in exchange for having the armed robbery charge dropped, but the judge rejected the deal. Chatman wanted to enter an "Alford plea," which means the defendant pleads guilty but maintains his innocence, but the judge wasn't having that.

So Chatman went to trial. It turns out that during the trial, the police had no evidence for the case. They didn't find a weapon. They didn't recover any money. There was no video. In fact, the clerk who identified Chatman ID'd him on Facebook over a year after the robbery. So the jury found Chatman not guilty of all charges.

But the judge wanted to send him to jail, so he did.

Niedrach still thought Chatman was guilty, so he revoked Chatman's probation and sent him to jail. Now Chatman must sit in prison until 2022.

To be clear, Chatman's original probation would have been finished five years after he was sentenced on July 6, 2012. Although that initial punishment seems harsh, Chatman complied with every requirement of the court. Even when faced with other criminal accusations, he turned himself in. By all accounts, he was a model citizen.

So Ramad Chatman is either imprisoned for a $120 TV he tried to steal in 2012 or is wasting away behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. Either is an injustice. Both are indicative of the statistics that show black men receive 60 percent longer sentences than their white counterparts and are twice as likely to receive mandatory minimums.

There is no logic or fairness in it. It is abundantly clear that justice for people of color is an oxymoron. It is as real as a Bigfoot being chased by a mermaid riding a unicorn. For us, due process is a myth. It is an old wives' tale we hear about but have never witnessed. A black man expecting to be treated fairly within the legal system would be just as well-served closing his eyes, standing in front of a bathroom mirror and reciting an incantation.

There is no justice for a black man in America.

There is no justice for a black man in America.

There is no justice for a black man in America.
Read the story of Ramad Chatman here.
About the author

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Black Man Found Not Guilty of Crime, Still Sentenced to 7 Years In Prison

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In today's example of how the American justice system treats black bodies, we take a look at Ramad Chatman, a 24-year-old man who was found not guilty by a jury of his peers but will serve seven years in prison because ...

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Nikole Hannah Jones has spent her entire career talking about racial inequality in education. In this interview, she explains how some schools today are even more segregated than they were in the 1970s and why that is.

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MacArthur Genius: Segregation in American Schools is “Intentional”

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The following article shows the actual statistics when it comes to police brutality rates of the past three years. These four charts show the highly alarming death rate of African Americans by police officers. What is even more alarming is that almost half of those deaths came with the victim having no sort of weapon on them.

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Updated June 19, 2020, with data from 2015-2019

Data collected by the Washington Post on the use of lethal force by police officers since 2015 indicate that, relative to the proportion of the population, Blacks are over-represented among all those killed by police. As is evident in the figure below, (looking at the top blue bar) according to the US Census estimates, Blacks made up 12% of the population. However, from 2015 - 2019 they accounted for 26.4% of those that were killed by police under all circumstances. In other words, Blacks were the victims of the lethal use of force by police at nearly twice their rate in the general population. Whites make up the majority of victims of police use of lethal force (50.3%) from 2015 - 2019, BUT they also currently make up the majority of the population (61%). Asians make up about 5% of the US population but just 2% of the victims of the lethal use of force by police. Hispanics make up 18% of the US population and just over 18% of the victims of the use of lethal force by police. Native Americans make up 1% of the US population and 1.7% of the victims of the use of lethal force by police.

One way to think about it is over- or under-representation. All things equal, a socially-constructed racial group should be subject to lethal encounters with the police at a similar rate to their proportion in the population. The figure below shows the over- or under-representation of racial-ethnic groups from 2015 to 2019 comparing the proportion of victims of lethal police encounters to the proportion in the respective annual US population estimates. Data points that are above the 0% line indicate over-representation among victims of police lethal force and data points below 0% indicate under-representation. Since 2015, the earliest year of data collection from this particular source, blacks have been over-represented by around 15%, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians have been roughly similarly represented relative to their proportion in the US population, and whites have been under-represented by around 10%. (Note: At the time of writing, data from 2019 had a larger number of "unknown" racial/ethnic identities of victims, 20% compared to 3-10% in previous years.) The rate of over-representation for blacks is relatively stable from 2015-2018 and shows initial signs of an increasing trend in 2019.

Is that the right comparison? Shouldn't we compare the percent of those killed by police to the percent of interactions with the police? Even more precise, shouldn't we compare the percent of those killed by police to those encounters that were actually life-threatening to either the police officers or other people? There are several problems with such comparisons.

First, that data doesn't exist. There are no national records of the nature of every encounter with police officers. Additionally, the definition of life-threatening encounters is subject to interpretation and video footage by bystanders or CCTV of many instances of the police use of lethal force has shown that what gets defined by officers as dangerous or life-threatening... is not. "Dangerous" is a subjective perception, even for police officers. Perceptions of danger are often tinted if not heavily skewed by explicit or implicit racist views that the black body is more dangerous. For more on the long history of race and policing see the book, Policing Black Bodies by Earl Smith and Angela Hattery, and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor among many others. See here for scholars responding to the idea that blacks commit more crimes. See here for ideas on improving the research and need for more data. Policing does not occur in an objective social vacuum. The history of policing shows that it has been used to repress and control African American communities and other communities of color (see here and the books mentioned above).

Second, the assumption that police encounters and the occurrence of crime are highly correlated is problematic. Crime statistics are records of policing, not crimes. Records of reported crime are records of victims who contact the police. We cannot assume that existing data on crime is a full account of crime or criminal activity. For decades there was a deliberate effort guided by formal policies that placed a focus of policing on drugs, the so-called War on Drugs. These policies and policing disproportionally targeted people of color resulting in mass incarceration even though whites and blacks report similar rates of drug use (see here and here). Racial profiling has been documented in traffic stops (a.k.a. "driving while black", stop and frisk enforcement in New York City, and more. Whites conduct disproportionate surveillance of blacks (see here and here). From Mapping Police Violence:

Policing happens in a social context. It is not objective. By comparing the proportions of racial-ethnic groups in the general population to the proportion of those killed by police, we take into account, without measuring directly, all the other social contexts that result in a disproportionate number of black victims of police lethal force. The social contexts of neighborhood segregation, income and wealth inequality, school resource inequality, school-to-prison pipeline processes, white supremacy, "color-blind" racism policy apathy, disproportionate poverty, voter suppression, labor force discrimination, and more.

Here is a specific example of how the level of policing does not correlate to the level of crime but rather the rate of the black population. In 2019, Lance Hannon and Aaron Siegel examined the police service areas of Philadelphia. In those areas where blacks make up less than 50% of the population, the correlation between police frisking people during traffic stops and the violent crime rate of the area is positive. Meaning that police are more attuned to the high rate of violent crime in some areas and are subsequently more likely to frisk people. We can see how that logic is reasonable for officers to engage. See that relationship illustrated below in the figure from their article in the sociology journal Contexts.

However, in police service areas of Philadelphia that are more than 50% black, the relationship between frisking and the rate of violent crime disappears. Traffic stops in these areas result in police frisking the drivers no matter the rate of violent crime. This relationship is evident in the figure below.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504219854723

As the authors state, "One potential explanation for these trends is that police officers may not perceive differences in levels of dangerousness among Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia. As is evident in our graphic, majority Black areas tend to have higher average violent crime rates than other spaces. Yet it is also true that many predominately Black places have violent crime rates significantly below the city's average. Consider the case on the far left in Panel B. It has a violent crime rate that is only one third of the city's average, but a frisk rate that is three times that of the comparable low-crime places in Panel A (places that are not predominately Black). It is possible that low-crime Black areas end up being painted with the same brush as high-crime Black areas due to neighborhood-level racial stereotypes."

The incidents that drive the protests and organization of Black Lives Matter are largely focused on the police use of lethal force on unarmed blacks. See some of the stories behind the data and headlines here. The figure below shows the total annual number of unarmed people of all races, genders, and ethnicities killed by police from 2015 to 2019. Since 2015, the number of unarmed people killed by police has clearly declined.

We can look at the distribution of race and ethnicity among those that were killed by police while unarmed in a couple of different ways. The first is to look at all those who were unarmed when killed and, within that group of victims, examine the racial and ethnic distribution. The figure below does this. Each bar represents 100% of the people who were unarmed when killed by police that particular year. Each bar is then proportionally divided by race-ethnicity. In 2015, 34% of those who were unarmed when killed by police were white, 40% black, and 20% Hispanic. The percentage of whites among this group of unarmed victims increases to nearly 49% by 2018 while the portion of blacks decreases to 36% and Hispanics to just under 15%. Again, 2019 data should be approached with caution due to the dramatic increase in victims in the database with "unknown" race or ethnicity. Just as with the ratio of all those killed to the proportion of the US population, while whites make up the highest percentage of those that were unarmed when killed by police, blacks remain overrepresented in the group relative to their proportion with the US population. Whites and Hispanics remain underrepresented among the victims. I focus on these three racial-ethnic groups because combined they account for nearly all those killed by police while unarmed.

The other way to examine the distribution of race and ethnicity in relation to the police use of lethal force on those that were unarmed at the time is by looking at the proportion of all those that were killed by police by race and then look at the proportion of each race that was unarmed when killed. The figure below does just that for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Each line represents the percentage of victims of that particular race-ethnicity that were unarmed when killed. So, in 2015, about 15% of blacks that were killed by police were unarmed. About 11% of whites killed by police were unarmed and a bit more than 6% of Hispanics killed by police were unarmed. In 2016 and subsequent years, there is a visible decline in the percentage of victims of each race-ethnicity that were unarmed when killed by police. 2019 appears to show near equal percentages of each group being unarmed when killed by police. Counts rather than percentages show that in 2019, 9 blacks, 19 whites, and 6 Hispanics were unarmed when killed by police. In 2015, 38 blacks, 32 whites, and 19 Hispanics were unarmed when killed by police.

Mapping Police Violence puts it this way (using their similar but not exactly the same data):

In sum, the number of unarmed people killed by police declined after 2015. Arguably, with a well-trained police force, this number should be zero. While whites constitute both the highest number and percentage of those killed by police and those unarmed when killed by police, they also make up a majority of the population in the US (~60% non-Hispanic white in 2019). Blacks are disproportionately impacted by the use of lethal force by the police relative to the general population. Blacks continue to make up a disproportionate number of all those killed by police and the number of those that were unarmed when killed by police. If we look at the victims of police lethal force by race in 2019, a similar proportion of the whites, blacks, and Hispanics killed by police were unarmed when killed.

While this is not the only issue that The Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter focuses on, it is key. Their efforts (organizing, protesting, advocating, etc.) have driven some policymakers and some police departments to take note and take (some but not enough) action to reduce the use of lethal force. While the data indicates that the problem of police lethal force clearly remains racialized, there are signs that incidents of lethal force by police are decreasing for those that are unarmed.

Teach well, it matters.

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...

A video by sociologist, Rashawn Ray, from the Brookings Institute.
How can we improve police accountability in the US?

Other excellent resources on the topic:

Click on the images below to be redirected to web pages or articles.

Search a specific police department on Mapping Police Violence 's tool:

. . .
Here is an attempt at documenting all the unarmed people of color killed by police from 1999-2014
Also, see some of my other related posts on this topic (click on the titles below to go to the full post):

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Click on the image below to go to the full story and polling data
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A recent study arguing that the militarization of the police helps neither them nor the community's view of the police. Read more here

A recent article on the predictors of Black Lives Matter protests. Click on the image to link to the full article.

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"A review of the shootings of unarmed people shows that officers were reported to be under physical attack in about 40 percent of the cases. The remaining 60 percent involved a variety of circumstances, including individuals' making provocative movements or verbal threats (31 percent) or fleeing, or being shot unintentionally or in undetermined circumstances, according to a review of news reports and video of the incidents. The news accounts cited in the Post database are typically summaries based on information provided by police at the time of each event."
. . .

. . .

"Instead of making officers more accountable and transparent to the public, body cameras may be making officers and departments more powerful than they were before. ... First, many officers are (either earnestly or conveniently) forgetting to activate their cameras when they're supposed to. Take the case of Terrence Sterling, an unarmed 31-year-old black man who was fatally shot this month by local police officers in Washington, D.C., after his motorcycle crashed into their car. Contrary to District of Columbia policy, no officer at the scene activated their body camera until after the shooting. The city released footage of Sterling's final moments this week -but that video begins more than a minute after shots were fired. .... The third threat is that many states have introduced or passed new laws that restrict public access to footage while preserving police access."

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The federal government will soon require police departments and law enforcement agencies to report information on the deaths of any citizens when interacting with police - during a traffic stop, after an arrest, in jail, etc. The data will be gathered quarterly and will hopefully address any gaps in the data that others, like the Guardian above, have tried to fill.

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Also from last year, an article exploring the weakness in the FBI data on civilians killed by police. Click on the image to be linked to the full article.

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"With increasing use of police body cameras come new tests of transparency and trust. This half-hour documentary looks at the consequences for law enforcement and communities, from the rollout to the courtroom."

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POLICE KILLING OF BLACKS: Do Black Lives Matter? - Sociology Toolbox

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Updated June 19, 2020, with data from 2015-2019 Data collected by the Washington Post on the use of lethal force by police officers since 2015 indicate that, relative to the proportion of the population, Blacks are over-represented among all those killed by police.

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"If Obama was president racism doesn't exist"

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"If Obama was president racism doesn't exist"

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This is a short excerpt of Ta-Nehisi Coates's interview on the daily show. It is easy to look at the success of our former president and say "if he could do it so can anyone else." However, the roads of our last two presidents were much different as are the case for most African Americans when compared to their white counterparts that have the same position.

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Colin Kapernick made more headlines than any other athlete did during the 2016 football season when he refused to stand for the national anthem before the game. Kapernick polarized the nation as he was praised for being a true American Patriot as well as a spoiled ungrateful American. Kapernick has not been signed by an NFL team since, but his protest has sparked a huge debate when it comes to African Americans having equal rights in this country.

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He had sat in silence for far too long. Colin Kaepernick, a man fighting for a starting quarterback position out west with the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem during Friday night's game against the Green Bay Packers.

Per NFL.com, he purposely immersed himself into this silent protest.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL.com "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

During a summer of renewed athlete activism, Kaepernick's protest is the first of its kind in the NFL during this new season. The NFL's conservative messaging, dedication to patriotism and known blacklisting of players who speak out about political issues makes the black quarterback's protest complicated.

He did say, however, that he is aware of the controversy; that he knows what he did will not sit well with people, even his employers, the 49ers. Kaepernick also said he did not inform the team or its affiliates of his intentions to protest the national anthem.

"This is not something that I am going to run by anybody," he said. "I am not looking for approval. I have to stand up for people that are oppressed. ... If they take football away, my endorsements from me, I know that I stood up for what is right."

This comes in the months and years after a larger lens has been placed on police brutality and racial violence in the United States. Following the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and many more, black athletes have taken their turn to activism, though most of this has occurred in the ranks of the NBA and WNBA.

Black athletes have even reevaluated how they've spoken to their kids about being black in America and interacting with the police during this new wave of activism in America. Kaepernick's refusal to stand for a flag for a country that oppresses people that look like him shouldn't come as a surprise.

In 1960, James Timothy "Mudcat" Grant, a former American baseball pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, was singing along with the national anthem and changed the words to "this land ain't so free I can't even go to Mississippi," which got him suspended following the dispute. Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf famously refused to stand during his NBA career in 1996 because he said the flag was a symbol of oppression. Toni Smith-Thompson, a basketball player at Manhattanville College, turned her back to the flag in 2003 during the playing of the anthem for similar reasons.

Sports are not a construct that can separate itself from other parts of society. It is not an escape. It is a construct that encompasses race. The NFL is a majority black league and the United States disproportionately arrests and kills more black people than anyone else.

Studies this year have found that police officers disproportionately use more force on black bodies than their counterparts. A Washington Post database collecting and investigating police killings has counted that 990 people have been killed by police in 2016.

Being black in America is not a simple task. Pile on the fact that Kaepernick, a black quarterback, might never start again for his franchise after leading them to a Super Bowl. Yet, facing these realities, Kaepernick's protest continues a march toward equal freedoms for people of color.

His stand is not unique. His passion is not a benchmark. But his protest, whether NFL coaches agree with him or not, sets a different tone in the NFL, that an anthem celebrating a country may not necessarily be inclusive to those who built it from the ground up.

Four years ago, when Kaepernick was gunslinging in the Super Bowl, he was often called a " thug" for his tattoos. Four years later, his protest begs to ask how his profile will be forever changed.

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Athletes must speak their minds despite criticism

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Colin Kaepernick explains why he didn't stand for the national anthem

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He had sat in silence for far too long. Colin Kaepernick, a man fighting for a starting quarterback position out west with the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the national anthem during Friday night's game against the Green Bay Packers. Per NFL.com, he purposely immersed himself into this silent protest.

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Graphic novel that is an autobiographical account of John Lewis's life through out the civil rights movement. These include the famous sit ins at restauraunts as well as switching to his present day life of Barrack Obama's inauguration.

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Rachel West explains why it is unfair to compare the Black Lives matter movement of today to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. She delves into the harsh reality that people don't feel the need for the Black Lives matter movement because inequality in America has already been "fixed" in many peoples eyes.

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Examining the different between the civil rights movement and modern black activism

Rachel West is a senior majoring in music education at North Central College.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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Not Your Mama's Civil Rights Movement | Rachel West | TEDxNorthCentralCollege

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Examining the different between the civil rights movement and modern black activism Rachel West is a senior majoring in music education at North Central College. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx