Since the Donald Trump Presidency began, we have been inundated with stories of Black people being vilified for trying to live like everyone else. A black woman was violently arrested after calling the police on a white man who pointed a gun at her. A family had law enforcement called because they had the audacity to grill while black. Last year a group of black teens were arrest for wearing hoodies while black.
Fox News commentators justified Trayvon Martin’s murder because he was wearing Mark Zuckerberg’s preferred attire.
A new study highlighted by Vice now helps shed light on what happens when these disputes are carried into a court of law. Court Reporters and police are misunderstanding black people and it has dire consequences on Black Lives and Black Justice.
From Vice:
For the study, called “Testifying while black: An experimental study of court reporter accuracy in transcription of African American English,” researchers tested already-certified court reporters based in Philadelphia by asking them each to transcribe 83 sentences in everyday AAE.
“In some cases, the errors were not harmful, because they were uninterpretable,” said Taylor Jones, one of the study’s authors and a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. “In others, they changed participants, actions, and order of events.” In 31 percent of the 2,241 transcriptions, researchers found, the court reporters’ errors changed the content of what the speaker was saying, misinterpreting either who was involved, what was happening, when it happened, and/or where it happened.
The article details how the testimony of Rachel Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, was attacked by white media.
We can clearly see that we not only need racial bias training for law enforcement officers but with everyone involved in our criminal justice system. Our society needs more familiarity with those that are different from ourselves in order to bring more understanding and justice.