From time to time we like to check out international news via BBC.com. To no surprise, the British Broadcasting Corporation tends to highlight negative news happening in the United States. One of the biggest issues BBC likes to highlight when writing news stories for the US usually deals with gun violence. Today BBC highlights 13 year old Jeremiah Hill and “how he became a murderer”. What was troubling to watch in the video is that the producers only focused on the crime, but not the conditioning of how Jeremiah’s upbringing in Jacksonville, Florida played a role. In fact, you can hear police detective Angel Santiago claim “the youth of today in these urban societies we need to be afraid of. Because they have no regard for life, they have no respect for anyone.”
- Generalizing all of the youth in “these urban societies” as being apathetic to life is pure bullshit and an agenda America loves to paint without viewing how “ghettos” in America were even created in the first place.
- the bravado of a black teen having to defend himself in society isn’t easy to view like a math problem or puzzle, it’s multifaceted and has stemmed from psychiatric pain and problems that have been ignored since Africans were brought to this country.
- Now we have an international news medium (BBC) that helps promote American stereotypes that inevitably make some international visitors afraid of black Americans.
Remember, no one chooses when or where they were born. The conditions that life places amongst them vary per person and unfortunately lead many juveniles to a unforgivable place (i.e. Prison). When we can begin to focus on how and why these incidents occur then we can begin to move forward to alleviate these systemic problems.
Product Of Society 