Hamper's Rivethead Summary And Analysis

Thesis: In April of 1999 two young men took it upon themselves to come to their school and murder 12 of their classmates, a teacher and injure more than 20 people before turning their weapons on themselves. 1999 was long enough ago to where some of you may or may not recall the disaster I am referring to; The Columbine High School Massacre

Tommie Shelby is an American philosopher and a professor of African American studies at Harvard University. In his article “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” Shelby discusses poor, black neighborhoods that have persisted in America for decades due to few public policy efforts to make things better. In his article Shelby brings up two approaches to this dilemma that he opposes. The first is the personal responsibility approach which appeals to American values of hard work and ultimately places blame on the poor rather than the government or society. The Technocratic approach on the other hand does the opposite. It blames the government for failing to fix the social conditions of the poor and refuses to blame the poor themselves even if they have done actions that have not necessarily improved their well-being. Shelby’s approach is a mix between the two. He says that we cannot blame the poor if the injustice of our society has changed the content of their obligations and thus making their behavior reasonable due to the unfair conditions they were subjected to. In other words they are a product of their environment. Shelby wants to get his point across that the existence of ghettos today is evidence that our society impaired by structural injustices and that the ghetto is not only the problem of those living in it, but all of ours.

Specific Purpose Statement: To persuade my audience that each individual must take responsibility for his or her own actions. The must not blame guns for problems caused by people. .

Throughout my years living in Oakland I have seen violence and distress within my community. What most people hear about Oakland is never really anything positive; it’s mostly always negative. Oakland is known to have a history of gang violence, drug abuse, high school dropouts, teenage pregnancies, and social injustice. Within my research I find myself asking this question, ‘Why is there so much violence in Oakland? And what is the major contributor of this hardship that my community faces? Throughout my research I have learned that social injustice is a major contributor to Oakland violence, followed by the News media shown on television that also helps Oakland have a bad reputation. Most of the violence created in Oakland also comes from

Another troubling consequence of the Patriot Act and the expansion of surveillance powers is the use of profiling. In order to efficiently gather intelligence information for the safety of this country, it would be common sense to develop a target of sorts to better focus the efforts made. Many believe that Muslims in this country have become the unfortunate targets of profiling. The monitoring of those with family and business ties to countries rooted with terrorism is a logical direction for

James W. Loewen wrote the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” to help students understand the past of the United States, and how it is effecting the present time. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” looks at 12 different American history textbooks, and points out the different lies, flaws, and sugar coated stories the textbooks present. Lowen explains how textbooks practice heroification, and how race and race relations are a major issue when it comes to American history. Among these topics, Lowen also sheds light on the truth about social classes in America, and how textbooks lie about the past and try to avoid the recent past all together.

Almost twenty years ago, on April 20th, 1999 just seemed like any other regular day of that time. Everyone went about their regular routine; parents going to work, children going to school, young adults going to colleges. But two high school seniors of Columbine High had no intentions of going about their regular days. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered their school with mind made of never leaving that school again alive but not before committing the most heinous and bloody massacre ever committed in the United States history. There has been bombing where the death toll was significantly higher than Columbine shooting. But what made this tragedy so terrifying was this was not any terrorist or radicalized person trying to avenge authorities; these were two teenagers killing their fellow classmates and teachers. Something that none thinks about, it was like a parent’s worst nightmare coming true. Eric and Dylan killed a total of thirteen people, students and teachers combined, and seriously injuring over twenty others . This shooting sent shockwaves across the country, but most evidently sent criminal justice community scrambling looking for answers into why these two boys did what they did? What happened that made them mass murderers? To explore these questions criminologists started applying crime theories to the both their present life and their upbringing.

Since the attacks of 9/11, Muslim communities have been “targeted” by methods such as racial profiling, according to the Toronto Star (1). In America, the FBI have detained over 400 Muslim-Americans to bring them in for questioning. Although the claims of Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller say that these detainments have nothing to do with religion and ethnic background, many say this is, in fact, racial profiling. Some believe that it is appropriate, some believe it is not appropriate. How is it not appropriate? It is not appropriate because, one, it is a form of discrimination, if directed at one culture; two, not all people of Arabic descent agree with the beliefs of the common Islamic terrorist; and three, by

Rebenstein and Ziewaxz (2014) explain how Detroit has been rated as the world’s most miserable city. In 2012 Detroit suffered 411 homicides, which was higher than in 1974 when Detroit was designated as the murder capital of the United States (p. 340). What causes all of these horrible things to happen in a city? Can the blame be placed solely on one people group? Policemen? Politicians? Teachers? Economic decline? Determining the blame for the current plight of Detroit is a very complex question that cannot be given a simple answer. Similar to the discussion regarding who was to blame for the Detroit Riots, no one person or area can be blamed for the city’s history and current state. It is clear through the textbook readings that multiple factors

The Orlando nightclub shooting in Florida on June 12, 2016 was the single largest massacre in U.S history, taking the lives of 50 individuals, including the shooter himself, and injuring 53 others. This is one extreme example of the gun violence that has been occurring in this country, but mass shootings like this and the one at Newton in 2012 are only a small part of our gun violence issue. The everyday gun violence that takes place in cities all across the United States claims the lives of thousands every single year. According to The Guardian, 33,500 civilians die each year because of gun brutality- “that’s about 1 life every 15 minutes” (Beckett). Between the years of 1999 and 2013, there were 464,003 gun deaths in the U.S, about 58% of them were suicides 37% were homicides. (ProCon.org) Gun violence and the consequences of that violence, have become a real and dangerous problem in the U.S , why else would the CDC list the United States as having the highest rate of gun violence out of all developed countries today? (Gale Opposing Viewpoints) This issue is not just attributable to a single factor, there are several that play an important part in why gun violence is such an issue in the U.S, namely laws and poverty; and in these causes we can also find solutions.

Since the 9/11 attacks, police have been worried that something even worse may happen that will make those attacks look like the opening act (Racial Profiling). Police have been using Stop and Frisk to their advantage and searching as many Muslims as possible. They have found searched over 600,000 people and out of all of them only less than 1,000 were found to have some connection to ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Police decided that Muslims do not pose a huge

The film Precious Knowledge takes a deeper look into the defense and fall of the Ethnic Studies program within the Tucson Unified School District. During the standoff, as Arizona lawmakers bombarded the students and educators with threats and false claims. A major question surrounding the film is whether or not this program’s failure was preventable. Jeff Biggers approaches the situation from a politically centralized point of view, having written for The New York Times, The Nation, and The Washington Post, as well as, working with MSNBC's “All In” with Chris Hayes. Biggers writes the review “Arizona’s Precious Knowledge: Blockbuster New Film Chronicles Ethnic Studies Battle” where he looks at the bureaucracy behind the film rather than

     The 20th of April was the anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The shooting deaths of 12 students and 1 teacher—and the two suicides of the teenage executioners and left many others psychologically and physically damaged. Who’s to blame? , On the issue of blame, of this massacre it is not music, or video games, and not even movies, it’s the shooters because everybody is responsible own actions. However, the parents could have been more involved in their lives. What parent wouldn’t notice their child listening to groups like Marilyn Manson, or I.C.P. (or known as Insane Clown Possie)(both band lyrics are filled with violence). Although, they were not totally accepted by

Violence is a liability in my community because there are so many people being killed by others for no reason. This affects my community because there are cops killing other people for no reason. Some do have reason to kill them, but some just because they want to commit suicide, they want to shoot them and say because they felt unsafe around them. In this situation, I feel that cops should actually help them out rather than trying to make things harder for the family members going through that situation with people wanting to commit suicide. This affects my community because people around might not feel safe. They might not feel safe around people due to the fact they are always shooting or something. This affects me because the more shooting I see, the more I feel that it is not safe to be out.There has been a lot of deaths due to the fact people it is right to be killing other people like it is nothing and make others go through the worst

The mass media selectively promotes racial profiling. The assumptions driving terrorism profiling are not any different than “street-level” profiling—in that, a particular crime (in this case, terrorism) is most expected to be committed by members of a particular religious, ethnic, or racial group and that the members of that group (in this case, Muslims) are, in general, likely to be implicated in that manner of criminal activity…These assumptions are highly defective. The assumption that terrorist acts are inevitably perpetrated by Arabs or that the architect, of a terrorist act, is likely to be Islamic is a faulty assumption. While all the men, believed to have been, involved in the September 11th hijackings were of Arabic nationality, Richard Reid, who on December 22, 2001, attempted to ignite a volatile device on a trans-Atlantic flight, was a British citizen of Jamaican ancestry. This furthermore coincides with my line of reasoning that extremists exist throughout all cultures. In fact, prior to September 11th the deadliest act of terrorism on United States soil was initiated by [Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh. Even non-Arabs like John Walker Lindh, a Californian, can be linked to the Taliban, al-Qaeda and