Hypothesis 1
America has an Justice System that is manipulated to be unjust against people of color, which leads to massincarserations of African Americans and overpopulated prisons.
America has been a free country since 1776 but African Americans were slaves from 1619-1865 and only gained equal rights in the 1960’s.
Practice Opening 1
After slavery, African Americans where deemed to be second class citizens. Around 1877 many states adopted segregation laws called Jim Crow Laws. These laws made it illegal for African Americans to integrate into the “White” society. Blacks weren’t allowed to attend the same school’s, drink from the same water fountains, or even use the same bathrooms as whites. If they were caught doing so they could be thrown in jail or even killed. Jim Crow Laws ended in the mid-1960’s, after the Civil Right’s movement. The government needed a new way to somehow deprive African American’s of their right’s. In 1968 the Richard Nixon campaign knew he couldn’t make it illegal to be black, so he declared a War On Drugs. He associated Hippies with Marijuana and African American’s with heroin. The Nixon Campaign felt that Black people and hippies were their enemies simply because hippies were against the war and Black people were fighting for right’s. He then criminalized both heroin and marijuana extremely to control both populations. All of this was in effort to get America to reelect Nixon. After the War on Drugs was introduced the prison population sky rocketed.
Practice Opening 2
America is known for being a free country, but we have the largest prison population in the world. We account for 25 percent of the worlds prison population. In the National Anthem there is a line that says “For land of the free and the home of the brave”. If we account for 25 percent of the worlds prison population how can we call our country free.
Proposal Summery
America has problems with enequality that many Americans ignore. Most Americans will not be effected by the enequalities such as laws created to arrest many African Americans so they chose to ignore them. Some people might neglect that laws were created to incarserate African Americans spicificly but its 100 percent true. African Americans were slaves in this country for 400 years so freedom takes on a new meaning to some black people. African Americans have the highest prison population in the country.
Sources
Prison Population after War on Drugs
Stop and Frisk Sources
Rowan Counterintuitive 