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Before and after Michael Brown - Toward an End to Structural and Actual Violence
- Author(s):
- Linda Sheryl Greene
- Date:
- 2015
- Group(s):
- MSU Law Faculty Repository
- Item Type:
- Article
- Permanent URL:
- https://doi.org/10.17613/1na7-6205
- Abstract:
- Darren Wilson's shooting of an unarmed nineteen-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was the tip of an iceberg of racial subordination and despair. The deep outrage over that shooting displayed in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri,6 the nation,7 and all over the world8 suggests that the shooting of Michael Brown was more than an isolated police killing of a Black teenager. The backstory involved the role of police departments and the criminal system in the lives of poor Blacks-the harassment, the violence, the hyper-criminalization, and the revolving door of mass incarceration-in combination with a racial and economic structure that systematically provides under-education, unemployment, and housing segregation. 9 This Article posits that individual instances of police deadly force against unarmed Black men are enabled by a legal jurisprudence of structural violence which provides no accountability for the societal marginalization and stigmatization of young Black men, as well as by a jurisprudence of actual violence, which permits police officers to decide whom to target and whom to kill with virtually no threat of criminal sanction or institutional civil liability.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 7 months ago
- License:
- Attribution
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before-and-after.pdf