As the grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., declined last week to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of a black man, University of Oregon experts weighed in on growing race tensions throughout the United States.
Yvette Alex-Assensoh, vice president for equity and inclusion, explores how shootings of unarmed black men by white officers are a warning to a larger issue. Her commentary, “Are Black Men America’s Proverbial Canaries in the Coal Mine?” discusses needed changes to the Fourth Amendment, a better understanding of implicit bias and how the UO campus can help create change.
“The seemingly rampant targeting of Black men by police officers is a toxin that has the capacity to kill others and undermine our democracy,” she writes. “The path forward includes an overhaul of problematic practices based on faulty 4th Amendment jurisprudence. It also requires increased awareness of implicit bias and how it perpetuates inequality as well as advantage, even when we seek to be egalitarian.”
Sociology professor C.J. Pascoe is co-editing the book “(Re)Theorizing Masculinities.” She writes about how young black men are represented in academic research and popular culture in the article “Racism, Punishment and the Lives of Young Men of Color” for Gender & Society, the peer-reviewed journal of Sociologists for Women in Society.
“I am sharing my comments now, in the wake of the grand jury investigation and an emerging national discussion about racial inequality, because it is important to think seriously about the criminalization of young, black, poor, urban men,” she writes. “It is important because how we know what we know about race, gender, and class shapes solutions to inequality.”
As news of the grand jury announcement broke, many took to Twitter to share reactions. Kelli Matthews, a public relations instructor in the School of Journalism and Communications, talked to Eugene television station KVAL for a story about how this type of news “is easy for social media users to cling to.”
In the interview, she said, "Boil an argument down to black and white, right or wrong, fair or unfair — those are the most base instincts we have as humans. … It can have a lot of very ugly consequences as well. Part of that is that we feel much more anonymous for our actions online."