Race Is a Factor in Police Shootings
Rosetta Kelly
Composition II
Tara Turzi
2/15/2015

Race Is a Factor in Police Shootings
There was a process that started in 1955 with racism and a 14 year old black teenager named Emmitt Till who was beaten, shot in the head, eyes gouged out, and hung for simply speaking to a white woman. Throughout the years racism and racial profiling progressed from Emmitt Till to recent years targeting another black teen named Trevon Martin. At the age of 17 Trevon Martin, was shot while walking home; his only weapons were a bag of Skittles candy and some juice. The most recent publicized victim of a police shooting was of an unarmed black male named Michael Brown, an eighteen year old who was confronted by the police for jaywalking. Police shootings are an inevitable result of a process that evolved from racism to racial profiling.
From the time Africans (Blacks) were snatched from their country, homes and families, and thrown onto slave ships, they were treated like they were less than European Americans, (Whites) and less than human.
White Americans went to African villages and stole the people from their families. They subjected these villagers to a cruel sea passage and tremendous abuse. They were kept in bondage by chains, made to work the white’s land, beat, whipped, the women were raped, and all were forced to eat no better than the livestock. They were given just enough food to have energy to work the land without any wages. From the beginning of being forced to live in America, the land of the free, blacks have been profiled and brutalized. In the 1800’s the police were the slave owners and the overseers. At that time, profiling was focusing on blacks who could be beaten into submission and were perceived as less than whites.
The police, perceived superior individuals to the common population, have been