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Alice Goffman

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Alice Goffman ends her book with the idea of a fugitive community. She explains that since the tough on crime campaign has been enacted, thousands of young black men are stereotyped as criminals by authorities. “Today…policies have turned its poor and segregated Black neighborhoods into heavily policed places where many young men are using fake names, looking over their shoulder, and living with the genuine fear that the closest to them may bring them into the hands of the police” (195). Although not all young black men participate in crime, the ones that do find themselves in a net of entrapment. These men, live lives on the run, never staying in one place for too long or telling people where to find you. A life lived in fear challenges the way these young black men act and see themselves in society. Life among these communities has formed a long history of mistrust between people, especially men and women. When studying 6th street, Goffman notices the particular effect police pressure had on a couple’s relationship. “Women’s pledges to protect the men in their lives dissolve under sustained police pressure, and some find they become the unwilling accomplices of the authorities (198). In …show more content…
America’s history is filled with numerous discriminatory acts against the black community. “Black people in the United States have been assigned not only diminished form of citizenship but a fugitive status through slavery…to the War on Crime”(203). African Americans, specifically poor black men continue to face extreme risk of social expulsion and criminalization. Although we live in a country under the power of a Black president, black men continue to be oppressed and targeted by the criminal justice system. Goffman argues that we must remove the racial caste system that has been in place for hundreds of years to end the discrimination of minority groups in our

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