두 도시 이야기: 퍼거슨과 미니애폴리스

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to examine why a number of blacks have been killed by police in the United States. The author maintains that police brutality should be understood not as the result of individual deviation but as the outcome of hierarchical racial structure by examining the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the 2020 horrific choking death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. After the 1970s, Ferguson, a once-vanilla suburb in which white Americans were the majority population group, was turned into a chocolate suburb where the majority of residents were blacks. Nevertheless, the white Americans still retained almost all of the city’s power. The shooting and killing of an unarmed teenager named Brown was the inevitable tragedy caused by the racial conflicts between the chocolate suburb and vanilla power. In 2020, Floyd, a 46-year-old black, was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The city of lakes has been considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. However, the city failed to put a ban on the use of excessive force by police officers. Floyd was victimized by Minneapolis police officers who became a group of beasts out of control.