In each police-related death recently dominating the headlines, authorities overreacted to black men’s behaviors as if they were life-threatening.
On Staten Island, an unarmed Eric Garner was wrestled to the ground by five police officers and strangled to death over selling loose cigarettes on the street. In Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown was gunned down after an altercation over walking in the street and under suspicion of stealing cigarillos from a convenience store. Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, was shot within two seconds of police pulling up to the playground where he was playing with a toy gun, despite a 911 caller’s tip that it probably was a toy. And a famous self-appointed authority, George Zimmerman, shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin simply for walking through his gated community.
The common theme in these cases? An overreaction to a perceived threat of black criminality.
[For more of this story, written by Mica Pollack and Tanya Coke, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...d-in-schools/385076/]
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