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The Social Justice Issues Of The Media Of A White Officer Fatally Shot A Young African American Man

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Throughout the past couple of years there have been many social justice issues coming to the forefront of everyone’s attention. Some of the most popular examples include Baltimore, Ferguson and Charleston, although there are countless other ones spread throughout the country. These are some of the most popular ones because of how much media attention they received, but was all that attention really a good thing? I believe that while these issues needed to be brought to everyone’s attention, the way that the media portrayed the situations did not help too much, it may have even hindered these issues. The way that the media portrayed certain groups of people further led to feelings or personal justification of racism and oppression. In…show more content…
Many of the people in Ferguson felt that this young man was fatally shot based off the color of his skin, and that this would not have happened if he was white. In fact, there is a large amount of African American individuals who believe that officers are “morally bankrupt” (Mcwhorter, 2014). This position is taken by countless communities across America (Mcwhorter 2014).
This plays a huge role in how the environment affected this man’s life. If there had not have been so much racial tension happening in Ferguson then this situation probably would never have happened, or at least to the extent that it happened. Mistrust of law enforcement leads to many issues such as even greater issues with the police when problems arise due to troubled history with them. African Americans in this community may not want to ask law enforcement for help when they are the leading group of arrests and longest prison sentences (Madrigal, 2014). The officer fatally shooting this young man was the last straw for a fair amount of people in this town. I believe that if the officer was doing what he believed was right, and not making judgements on the young man for the color of his skin, then he was just doing his job and it turned out to be a horrible situation. With all the differing stories that are taking place in the media surrounding that aspect of it this will be a hard situation to fully comprehend. There are obviously undercurrents
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