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Brent Staples Essay Is Still Relevant Today

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Brent Staples’s essay is still relevant today because of the fear that lives inside people who don’t understand or accept others, which often leads to authorities abusing their power so that they can feel safe while others live their lives cautiously. This relates to how both African Americans and the police live their lives in fear and with caution. The police fear African Americans due to their own prejudice reasons which causes them to abuse their authority by acting more aggressive which helps themselves feel safer and stronger. This forces African Americans to live their lives with caution and patience because if they don’t, they put themselves at a higher risk of endangering themselves. Brent Staples wrote the article “Black Men in Public …show more content…

For example, in December of 2014, twelve-years-old Tamir Rice (Black skinned) was playing with a toy gun in his neighborhood when a police patrol car came and shot the kid without reasoning with him first. This was a very shocking case, as seen in video surveillance the cop shot the kid within seconds of pulling up on him. This shows the fear that was inside of the cop took over, and he acted on instinct and killed the boy. A statistic was posted on May of 2017 by German Lopez (a writer for Vox) which shows the ratio of races who have been killed by the police per million people, and Blacks and Native Americans are shown to hold the highest death ratios by double the amount of other races. The statistic shows that Black people are heavily discriminated on as the police are shown from time and time to be heavily prejudiced against black people, as they abuse their authority and feel they can get away with acting more aggressive towards them. These examples show that what Brent Staples wrote about fear and guns is still true till this day, as more and more cases are shown in the media of an police officer killing unarmed, non-aggressive African

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