Diary of Systemic Injustices

While in my hometown Speedway, I witnessed a very common type of systemic injustice. Two friends came into the building, one being white and the other black. They separated to two different aisles, and immediately the store clerk’s eyes followed the black teenagers location. The store clerk seemed to try and make it obvious that he was watching, and it was clear to me that he was trying to prevent stealing. I think the black friend recognized this also, as he soon went to stand with his white friend. This doesn’t mean the store clerk was a bad person, but surely subconscious discrimination had occurred. The issue here is that this is so common. This story that black people steal more than white people, is a very old stereotype. Stereotypes like this are often instilled into people’s brains, and that’s why we need to make a conscious effort to recognize and correct them. People ignore these subconscious stories, and refuse to recognize them because they’re not a racist person. But your moral beliefs as a person can be very different from the implicit bias within you, the two don’t have to align. For example the store clerk may be a black lives matter supporter, and be very anti-racists, but thinks he’s just doing what “needs to be done” by watching the black kid in his store. Being more suspicious of black people, like this case in the gas station, leads to an unequal false accusation rate. It also leads to black people feeling unsafe around people of authority. This is a small issue, and many small issues make a big impact. Falsely accusing of stealing is just the smaller scale version of falsely accusing of a more serious crime. If people could stop this specific assumption that “black people steal more”, then maybe there would be less falsely accused black people of larger crime as well. This connects very well with King’s letter from jail. Martin Luther King Jr. spelled out perfectly in his letter that small injustices can be just as bad as large ones when it comes to civil equality. He also emphasized that those who say they believe in racial equality need to work towards it, because doing nothing is working against it. Small injustices are something like a gas station clerk immediately distrusting the black individual in his store. He didn’t harm the boy, or cause him any further trouble, but he worked against the movement of racial equality in this action.