Response to the Police Killings of Jessie Hernandez and Antonio Zambrano-Montes
Keywords
Loading...
Authors
Issue Date
2017-04-25
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Despite an increasing awareness regarding brutality and unauthorized use of deadly force by law enforcement in the US, this awareness is overwhelmingly centered on black communities, most notably in Ferguson. This can be considered an example of what some scholars have called the Black/White Binary paradigm; a paradigm that causes US society to think about issues affecting people of color and ethnic minorities only from within a framework of African American oppression and white privilege and aggression. Police brutality, however, also affects Latina/o communities in the US, communities where, for instance, Jessica “Jessie” Hernandez and Antonio Zambrano-Montes were shot and killed by law enforcement under circumstances that warranted close scrutiny. This thesis analyzes the public response to these two cases and provides an answer as to how their deaths were framed by the news media and by protest organizations. It finds that the Black/White Binary paradigm has evolved in the past two decades to include a self-justification system, the Immigrant/Threat frame, which allows instances of police violence against Latinas/os and oppression of Latina/o people at large to be dismissed on the grounds that this group has a rich immigrant culture.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Letteren