By Mustafa Caglayan
NEW YORK
A recent grand jury decision that cleared a white police officer in a deadly shooting has once again exposed the fundamental problem of institutional racism rooted deep within American history.
The nation's latest racial trauma was prompted when a Missouri grand jury made up of nine whites and three blacks, failed to bring charges against Darren Wilson for fatally shooting unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
It was a decision that, not unexpectedly, sparked nationwide unrest.
Institutional racism is defined as a pattern by social institutions that negatively treat a group of people based on their race.
According to New York City-based civil rights attorney Michael Warren, it is the key concept to understanding Monday's grand jury decision.
"It is symptomatic of a number of other cases in the past where young men of color have been shot or killed in some other fashion by police officers, and ultimately exonerated by the institutions that protected their interests in doing so," he said.
Young black males are 21 times more likely of being killed by police than their white counterparts, according to an Oct. 10 report from Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom ProPublica.
More than 1,200 of the deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 found in federal data show that black teens were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white male teenagers died at the hands of police, the report said.
The officer at the center of the Ferguson case appeared in a television interview to defend shooting Brown. In his first TV interview since the fatal shooting on Aug. 9, Wilson said he shot the unarmed teen because he perceived him as threat to his life.
"That type of arrogance, that type of mental impunity only exists because he and other police officers like him know that there are institutions in the society, all over this country, that would protect them if they engage in this type of criminal activity or behavior," said Warren.
He said the system guarantees police will not face any real consequences for their actions against communities of color.
Out of the 53 commissioned police officers serving in the black-majority St. Louis suburb of Ferguson at the time of Brown’s death, only three were black, according to the police chief.
Figures published in a report from the Washington-based think tank Urban Institute show that "those employed in high-wage local government jobs have consistently been disproportionately white over the past 50 years."
"Where the general population in the 100 largest metro areas was 84.9 percent white in 1960, 92.7 percent of people working in high-wage occupations were white," according to the report.
Warren said communities of color in the U.S. are in effect "colonized territories, occupation zones in very much the same fashion that exists in occupied Palestine" where Palestinians are facing tremendous oppression by the Israeli authorities.
"That oppression by the institution in Israel, and annexation by the police, the military and of course the legal system ... whenever you have that type of diabolical symmetry, then obviously any proceeding that is supposed to promote justice ultimately result with abject injustice," he said.
Michael Brown’s tragic death helped bring to the fore an alarming national trend of police using excessive force against people of color, often during routine encounters.
"Perpetuation of the same problem has historically had an adverse impact on people of color," Warren said.
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