Chicago police shooting revealing

By David A. LOVE

Tribune News Service

The shooting of a black teen by a white Chicago police officer and the subsequent cover-up have further exposed the deadly institutional racism that permeates our nation’s criminal justice system.

On Oct. 20, 2014, Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shot Laquan McDonald, 17, by unloading 16 bullets into the teen’s body. It took more than a year for the city of Chicago to release dash-cam footage of the incident and for the Cook County state’s attorney to file first-degree murder charges against him.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch has announced a Department of Justice investigation of the Chicago Police Department for possible civil rights violations.

Chicago — like Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and other cities — has emerged as a national focal point for questions from the public: Why are black people, particularly young black men, killed by the police? Why do such atrocities continue to occur, and why do African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color receive unequal treatment in the schoolroom, at traffic stops, in the courtroom, and behind bars?

One reason is that America still has not come to terms with its legacy of slavery, including the branding of black people as inferior and as criminals, along with other crippling racial stereotypes.

A Department of Education study found that black students are expelled three times more frequently than their white peers and are referred more often for criminal prosecution. Black and Latino students are often perceived by teachers as being disrespectful, unruly and unintelligent. Burdened by low expectations, these children are shunted into a school-to-prison pipeline.

In the court system, subconscious racial bias distorts justice. The American Bar Association has found that 88 percent of lawyers in the United States are white and only 4.8 percent are black, while 95 percent of prosecutors are white and 79 percent are male. The majority of those incarcerated are men of color.

A recent comment by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who said black college students are “pushed into schools that are too advanced for them” and would benefit from a “slower track,” is an extreme example of the racial bias that permeates American institutions.

The deaths of black people at the hands of police show just how deadly that bias can be.

For the sake of justice, and for the sake of young men like Laquan McDonald, we must demand reform.

David A. Love is a freelance writer and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia. He wrote this for Progressive Media Project, a source of liberal commentary on domestic and international issues; it is affiliated with The Progressive magazine. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC