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Ryan Metzger - Final Thoughts - Why Does Systemic Racism Exist? And How Do We Solve It?

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 Ryan Metzger - 4/1/2021 Final Thoughts - Why Does Systemic Racism Exist? And How Do We Solve It?        To start this blog I am going to show you two different pictures, one of them is from Chicago in 1919, and the other is in Baltimore in 2015. Red Summer in Chicago: The Race Riots of 1919 (Bates) Riots in Baltimore After The Killing of Freddie Gray: 2015 (Lee)      Nearly a century later, and with a new era of "Jim Crow Laws", what has changed? And more importantly, is systemic racism worse now in 2021 than it was more than a century before in 1919?   The answer to that question is starting to become grimmer as America seems to drift further apart every day. Considering that over 592,000 Black people were incarcerated as of 2007 (Gramlich), I don't think America has come very far, if not gone backward.   Time and time again in American history, we have seen the systemic oppression of Black people. First, it was slavery, then it w...

Ryan Metzger - The Mass Incarceration of the Black Men of America - Rhetorical Analysis

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 Ryan Metzger - 3/25/2021 The New Jim Crow - Rhetorical Analysis -  Mass Incarceration, Then and Now (Remnick)      Hi everyone, welcome back to my blog! In this blog I will be discussing mass incarceration of the Black Community, and more specifically, the Black men of America. Many of us at one point or another have heard of the stereotype that Black fathers are usually not with their kids, but why has this become a stereotype, and how?     Alexander answers this question in depth with lots of facts and information as per usual, but also adds some questions of her own in order to give new light to the conversation. Alexander uses rhetorical questions throughout the entirety of the book in order to show a new viewpoint of a topic, or make the reader question what they may have previously believed to be true. Alexander's rhetorical questions work extremely well with here style of asking a question, providing evidence that answers the question, and then...

Ryan Metzger - Racial Disparity and its Plaguing of America

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 Ryan Metzger - 3/18/2021 Racial Disparity - Arguement Crack Vs. Cocaine - A Disparity Like No Other (Lacroix)      Throughout the entirety of The New Jim Crow, Alexander has been proving her underlying argument that there is systemic racial disparity in America. Be it the police, the C.I.A, the U.S. Government, the Justice Departent, the courts, or the jails, racial disparity plays a role in the treatment of individuals throughout America. Alexander proves this argument definitively and effectively through the use of extensive research and facts. I must admit, I really appreciate the style Alexander uses to form arguments over an extended period of time, almost like she is building a court case. Alexanders investigative journalism allows The New Jim Crow to thrive in its logical and emotional evidence, and is able to display the sequence and similarity in which events have played out in American history.     "Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely...

A Militarized Police Force Willing to Rain Bullets In Order to Make It Rain Cash

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 Ryan Metzger -  The New Jim Crow - Relevance Civil Forfeiture, The Enemy of The People (Rawlinson)     Wow!... This book has left me speechless more times than any other piece of literature or information I have ever read, and even that may be an understatement. Alexanders take on an informational book has really brought it to a whole new level with her complex comparisons and facts about the systemic racism that plagues our country. Throughout chapter two and three, the level of detail and scrupulous information is unparalleled by anything else I have read thus far in my life. Chapters two and three talked about extreme problems in our policing system like: the militarization of our police forces, for profit policing including civil forfeiture, and other blood boiling acts of racism like simply ignoring the entire 4th amendment of the Constitution. Of all of those topics presented, this blog is mainly going to focus on for profit policing.  ...

The New Jim Crow Blog #1: The War on Drugs, Yet No War on Poverty.

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 Ryan M. - BLOG #1 Analyzing Systemic Racism and The War on Drugs:      This past week I started reading The New Jim Crow, a book that dives deep into the manifestation of racism in our society. I really enjoy the book so far! It is full of mind-opening evidence and facts from over a hundred different sources. It includes scandals like The War on Drugs and so many statistics on how events like The War on Drugs played out for people in America, and specifically how it affected people of color. Richard Nixon, The War on Drugs (Karimi) "The CIA admitted in 1998 that guerrilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United Stated--drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine"(Alexander).     Throughout the Intro and Chapter 1, Alexander reveals damning evidence involving racism in The War on Drugs that started during the Nixon era. The "war" was then blow...