Creating a children’s book to show how wrong discrimination, individually race discrimination, is and will be until it is fixed within our criminal justice system. This was inspired by the course American Dreams and Nightmares because not everybody has the same start, and that is so detrimental to everyone working in the system. We’ve set certain minorities up to fail and then blame them personally for the system we’ve been unable to correct.
These Poof’s I’ve created to represent the injustices done to African-Americans in the United States. I wanted to show the progression of discrimination since the early 1900s. To confirm that discrimination isn’t going away but merely evolving in different ways. I used the theoretical text “New Jim Crow Laws” by Michelle Alexander. The Poof’s in the story are all the same minus their colors. The blue Poof’s were labeled as Didit’s because they had always been blamed, still being the ones who did it. I went through some critical civil rights movements. Rosa Parks and bus boycotting helped the civil rights movement gather power. Martin Luther King Jr. was also a key figure who helped people of the time see past a world of separation.
These, along with others, helped build up the base to begin speaking on “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” which was my central theme of the book. There was a page on the Mayor’s people releasing Snuff’s into the neighborhoods, I used the molecule for crack-cocaine to represent the time in the 80s that crack-cocaine was purposely distributed to African-American communities to trap them into addiction and then to create mandatory sentencing so the African-Americans would be put into prison for a minimum of three years.
I also used the CNN article on the two African American men that got thrown out of Starbucks for my current events piece. I think this was a perfect example of discrimination in the United States just evolving. My inspiration for this piece wanted to start learning young. Let us teach young children the critical aspects of living in the world so they can be prepared — something as effecting as discrimination and mass incarceration. The first step is awareness. Living in the age of being colorblind, but also trapping people in their situations due to the basis of their skin color needs to end.
Contemporary American Dreams & Nightmares 