Thursday, July 8, 2010

Oscar Grant Verdict

The verdict just came in and officer was found guilty on involuntary manslaughter for the death of Oscar Grant. In case anyone is not caught up on this, this goes back to New Year's Eve when a BART police officer mistakenly killed Oscar with a gun, instead of using his taser, which is what he thought he was reaching for.

This incident happened at the Fruitvale BART station, which is the same BART train station that I commute to work everyday. I got home today and noticed the Fruitvale BART plaza has boarded it's merchants stores anticipating a riot from today's verdict.

So now we're playing the waiting game to see if Oakland & SF is going to riot. Since Oakland is made up 60% of African Americans and Oscar Grant was African American, it's their community whose is affected by this mostly. But also, the outcome affects the rest of the African American U.S. population at large because the verdict reflects the current relations between black americans and the U.S. government.

Does any of this sound familar? The parallels between different american race groups who've been mistreated by our system is uncanny.

I'm not saying it was a good thing when black people rioted during the Rodney King trial but those extreme demonstrations did change how the system handles unfair outcomes in the U.S. court system.

So we'll see how everyone handles this.

xoxo

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