Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis

/in /by
  • Watch the video, read the New York Times article listed below and answer the following question. Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis
  • .Question: Why in the video, did white people say the accident had had nothing to do with racism or racial discrimination? Why did black people say that Cynthia had been killed because of racism? Did the driver of the track run over Cynthia because she was black? Did this incident have anything to do with discrimination?—————————-Video:————————–

ORDER A PLAGIARISM – FREE PAPER NOW

  • Mall Accused of Racism in a Wrongful Death Trial in BuffaloNew York Times, Nov. 15, 1999Nearly four years ago, a black teenager was crushed beneath a dump truck as she crossed a seven-lane highway to get to her job at a mall. The shopping center had barred stops by her bus, which mainly served poor minority neighborhoods.Now the death of Cynthia N. Wiggins, 17, is the focus of a wrongful death trial. Her family, which hired the lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., is seeking $150 million in damages. Mr. Cochran argued last week before a jury that includes no blacks that racism contributed to her death.”Her fate was sealed when she was a little 10-year-old fifth grader,” Mr. Cochran told the jury during opening remarks on Monday. Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis. ”Her destiny is being decided by powerful businessmen who run a mall.”The trial is expected to last several weeks. Shortly after the six-member jury was seated, Mr. Cochran was overruled when he objected that the selection process had been flawed. Out of 95 people chosen at random from Erie County for the jury pool, five — or 5.2 percent — were black, compared with 12.3 percent of the county’s population. The jurors are three white women, two white men and a man of Indian descent.The family is suing the mall’s owner, Pyramid Companies of Syracuse, the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which operates the Metro Bus line, the driver of the truck and the company that owned it.The story of Ms. Wiggins’s death has slowly emerged in the courtroom of Justice Jerome C. Gorski of State Supreme Court. On a dreary December morning, Ms. Wiggins said goodbye to her 4-month-old son, Taquilo Castellanos, and her grandmother at their home on Buffalo’s east side, and caught the Route 6 Metro Bus to her job at the food court in the Walden Galleria in suburban Cheektowaga. She got out at Walden Avenue and skirted between the bus and banks of snow. Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis.Instead of walking up to the intersection, which has no crosswalks or pedestrian signal, she threaded her way through stopped traffic and had made it across six of the highway’s seven lanes when the light changed.Witnesses say a dump truck knocked the teenager to the pavement. The rear wheels rolled over her. The driver, John P. Bunch, said he never saw Ms. Wiggins. She died two weeks later, never regaining consciousness.Mall officials have acknowledged they turned down the transit authority’s repeated requests to allow the Route 6 bus onto their property, but say they did so to keep out rowdy juveniles, who had been causing problems at a nearby mall and a skating rink. After Ms. Wiggins’s death, the mall opened up its property to public buses, under the threat of a boycott by the Buffalo teachers union and local civil rights groups.In testimony, bus officials have described a mall more interested in discouraging the poor from visiting than in deterring crime.Gordon Foster, a retired transportation authority official who before the mall opened in 1989 had been involved in trying to bring the Route 6 bus onto mall property, said a Pyramid executive, Kenneth D. Cannon, made it clear that would not happen. ”It sounded like a class thing,” Mr. Foster said, ”and that was quite a revelation.”The first allegation of racism arose when a white businessman whose family owned a local music store chain said he was shocked when Mr. Cannon told him that public buses would not be allowed.”I knew the people who rode those buses were our customers and clerks,” the businessman, Stafford D. Ritchie II, testified. He said he also knew most of the people riding the Walden Avenue bus were black. Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis. ”I concluded this was discrimination based on race,” he said.Lawyers for the Galleria have emphasized that bus riders have always had the choice of transferring to a shuttle that stopped 200 feet from a mall entrance and did not require crossing a highway.The mall’s lawyers have also said the Galleria, which did allow charter buses, was not legally obligated to allow access by public transportation. They said other Buffalo area malls were excluding Metro buses at the time of the accident. And, they note, Ms. Wiggins was jaywalking.”This event that occurred on Dec. 14, 1995, was a traffic accident,” said the mall’s lawyer, Robert P. Watkins, of the Washington firm Williams & Connolly. ”It was a tragedy, but the mall had nothing to do with it.”Although top officials from Pyramid, including Mr. Cannon, have not yet taken the witness stand, the shopping center’s general manager, James Soos, testified he was surprised to learn that his superiors had denied bus access to the mall. Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis

    (1) Why in the video, did white people say the accident had had nothing to do with racism or racial discrimination? (
    2) Why did black people say that Cynthia had been killed because of racism?

  • (3) Did the driver of the track run over Cynthia because she was black?
  • (4) Did this incident have anything to do with discrimination? If it did, what kind of discrimination? Micro, macro or structural? Lehman College Race and Ethnicity Racism and Structural Discrimination Analysis