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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Racial Profiling, Security, And Human Rights, Faye V. Harrison
Racial Profiling, Security, And Human Rights, Faye V. Harrison
Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events
Neighborhood Watch coordinator George Zimmerman’s February 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, 17-year old African American in a gated community in Sanford, Florida has raised serious questions concerning racial profiling. Although a violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, ample evidence attests to racial profiling’s pervasiveness as a law enforcement tactic in contexts of street-level crime, counterterrorism, and immigration control. Since September 11, 2001, the longstanding problem of racial profiling has both deepened and expanded in terms of the populations targeted. Incentives to profile have been built into laws and policies that sacrifice civil liberties and …
License To Kill: Theoretical Critique Of “Stand Your Ground” Policies, Lonn Lanza-Kaduce, Andrea Davis
License To Kill: Theoretical Critique Of “Stand Your Ground” Policies, Lonn Lanza-Kaduce, Andrea Davis
Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events
This paper extends themes from sociologist Austin Turk’s theory of normative-legal conflict to the Martin tragedy and Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” as a point of entry for examining more general theoretical notions about how legal and social statuses can combine in counterintuitive ways. His theory is premised on deference and the impact that different ways of structuring social interaction will have on the probabilities that conflict will become overt. In some contexts, the relationship between legal status and social status allow the potential for conflict to de-escalate. In others, the relationship aggravates the prospect for overt conflict. Because laws …
Trayvon Martin And The International Press, Michael Leslie, Stania Antoine
Trayvon Martin And The International Press, Michael Leslie, Stania Antoine
Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events
Just as international coverage of the Emmett Till case in 1955 marshaled domestic support for the civil rights movement, international coverage of the Trayvon Martin murder focused attention on the disgraceful mishandling of the Martin’s murder case, spurring international, national and local public protests, and ultimately forcing the indictment of his killer. This paper examines the international discourse generated around the Martin affair and argues that such discourse widened domestic discourse regarding the murder, transforming the murder of yet another black youth into a referendum on the functioning of the American criminal justice system and the myth of the American …
Jim Crow Riding High: The Latest Assaults On African American Voting Rights, Richard K. Scher
Jim Crow Riding High: The Latest Assaults On African American Voting Rights, Richard K. Scher
Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations: Lectures and Events
The aftermath of the shooting of Trayvon Martin raises serious issues about a possible double standard between the enforcement of civil rights for African-Americans and white Americans. This paper discusses two key voting rights – hence, civil rights - enforcement issues, voter suppression and disenfranchisement. While the 1965 Voting Rights Act guarantees the right to vote to all qualified Americans, there is substantial evidence that this right is often denied minorities. It has included strenuous efforts to suppress the black vote. How extensive is this effort, and what effect did suppression have on recent elections, including the Presidential election of …