Group B
Summary Post
The newspaper article titled “In America, Black Children Don’t Get to be Children” goes on to talk about the obstacles that black children must go through due to the categorizations they are given because of their skin color. Stacey Patton, the author, states that black children are “considered to be innately inferior, dangerous and indistinguishable from black adulthood”. Using the cases of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as examples to prove the aforementioned, Patton incorporates the testimonies of Wilson and Zimmerman to explain how the two boys were seen as, for example, a demon and stripped of their identity as adolescences. Patton also brings up the fact that this phenomenon also existed in the past, dating as back as the Jim Crow era. The fact that children of the black race are believed to be older than what they really are, exposes them to harsh consequences which children of the majority white race would never face. It is because of this that the black community does not place a lot of trust in the law enforcement with regards to white officers. Black parents begin to instill in their children that white officers should be feared because they will cause harm and even worse, death to the black community. Tying in the idea that was brought up earlier by Wilson in his testimony regarding Brown as a demon, black children are succumbed to unfair judgment because they appear to be different than the ideal look of white Americans. Patton states that this behavior has been ingrained in our history and that it will continue unless this behavior towards the black community changes.
