This Is Not a Gun: So, Officers, Stop Shooting Unarmed Black Men

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A timely reminder.


Too many black men have lost their lives because of encounters with police officers whose racially charged presumptions about what the men were holding in their hands informed their decision-making minutes before the men were gunned down.

In fact, it’s what Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a Stanford psychologist and one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur “genius” grant, works on day in and day out: the ideology that black men are associated with criminality. Her studies indicate that if you show people an image of a black man and then immediately show them a blurred image, they will most likely make out a gun, a knife or some sort of object associated with crime, simply because they were shown a photo of a black man seconds prior. That kind of unconscious prejudice toward black men is ingrained in some collective psyches, and it’s time we address it.

To bring attention to those racially charged instincts, here is a list of some of the innocuous objects that unarmed black men were carrying, or going for, right before they were shot by law enforcement.

See link for objects...
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/10/objects_that_were_mistaken_as_weapons_by_officers_who_shot_unarmed_black.html