On July 7, 2016, President Barack Obama addressed the nation concerning Alton Sterling and Philando Castille's murders.

"All of us, as Americans, should be troubled by these shootings, because these are not isolated incidents; they are symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system," he stated.

This issue has plagued our community and is built on a systemic mindset that "whiteness" is considered normal and "blackness" is threatening. It has halted our ability to truly look deeper into each other and see past the color of each other's skin.

According to The Guardian,

"Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year. Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age."

Statistics like these leave us asking the question: Is our system designed to raise Americans with the mindset that African-American's are to be feared rather than respected as ordinary human beings?

Now, let's be honest with ourselves for a moment. We know the history of our country. It is very clear that the "American Dream" was built on the backs of millions of African people. We can also agree that in recent years, the oppression of African-Americans has made itself prevalent once again, just in a different form. African-American people may not physically be getting lynched — defined as (of a mob) kill (someone), especially by hanging, for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial) — but the systemic lynching of black people has undeniably been acknowledged due to the advancement in technology. African American people are basically being targeted, and it is because for over 400 years, systemic oppression of black people prevailed and the killings of innocent black individuals seemed to be a state sponsored offense due to police officers not getting convicted. It is relevant to argue that the African American community is a specific target within this system. Studies have found the African American community is over-policed, and this is probably a direct result of how African Americans are categorized.

According to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African Americans in the general population. While this data may be imperfect, other sources in individual states or cities, such as in California or New York City, show very similar patterns.

The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem. African Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin, and police bias may be responsible. African Americans have a very large number of encounters with police officers. Every police encounter contains a risk: The police officer may be poorly trained, act with malice, or, simply, be biased. The omnipresence of guns exaggerates all these risks.

Politician Bernie Sanders once stated,

"This is one of the great tragedies in our country today, and we can no longer continue to sweep it under the rug. It has to be dealt with. Today a male African-American baby born today stands a one-in-four chance of ending up in jail. That is beyond unspeakable,” he said. “So what we have to do is the radical reform of a broken criminal justice system


“What we have to do is end over-policing in African-American neighborhoods. The reality is that both the African-American community and the white community do marijuana at about equal rates. The reality is four times as many blacks get arrested for marijuana. Truth is that far more blacks get stopped for traffic violations...


“The truth is that sentencing for blacks is higher than for whites. We need fundamental police reform, clearly, clearly, when we talk about a criminal justice system. I would hope that we could all agree that we are sick and tired of seeing videos on television of unarmed people, often African-Americans, shot by police officers.”

Although slavery is not legal outside of prisons, it is indeed, within them. According to the Thirteenth Amendment, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

As the Thirteenth Amendment clearly states, slavery is accepted within prisons. With that being said, African-Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population, and if it wasn't a known fact, the US Department of Justice statistics show that, as of 2013, there were 133,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the US, constituting 8.4 percent of the overall US prison population.

Mr. Sanders' statement is nothing far from the truth; before we can truly change anything about our country, we have to dismantle the flawed system that it was built on. We have to acknowledge that there is a such thing as privilege, and it does not just include financial security. It involves representation within our criminal justice system and allows white superiority to thrive.