Is the criminal justice system reinforcing the strained minority/authority relationship?
Minorities and Authority: How was this dynamic created? Brief History of African Americans and Authority African Americans were forced from their homes into ships and taken to America to be sold on blocks like cattle to plantation owners and other rich white landowners. Laws were written to protect the masters and to grant them complete rights over their property. For example, in the Virginia Slave Laws it is written that the master has the right to discipline his slaves and if the slave by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accounted felony, but the master be acquitted from molestation, since it cannot be presumed that premeditated malice should induce any man to destroy his own estate (Henning 260). The very nature of such a law creates a very strong enforcing arm for those in authority. From the beginning African Americans were put into a very tense relationship with the law and other authority figures. However, this relationship did no
