George Floyd, a black man, died in the custody of the Minneapolis police after being suspected of forgery. A video of him being pinned to the ground by the officer's knee has since gone viral on social media, leading to an uproar about the criminal justice system being broken.
However, this is not true.
The criminal legal system is working exactly the way it was designed to work.
The legal system was designed to preserve the ideals and values of the dominant group in the United States. And throughout the country's history, it has done just that. It has protected white people, heterosexual people, gender-conforming people, and the wealthy while utterly failing people of color, genderqueer, LGBTQ people, and the poor. The legal system has served not just to enforce white supremacy but to punish and criminalize those who do not fit white ideals.
The legal system works in a way that the mere existence of people of color is deemed a threat to whites, so deadly force is justified within this system as a means of defending oneself from a threat that, in reality, does not exist.
Black people being killed by the criminal justice system is not evidence that the system is broken because this system was never meant to protect the lives of people of color.
The system is meant to subjugate them and kill them in order to maintain white supremacy. The death of George Floyd does not show that the system is broken. It shows that the system is working exactly how it was designed to work. It is protecting the people it was meant to protect and killing those it has always deemed unworthy.
The criminal legal system is not broken. It's flawed and inherently racist and void of any and all forms of justice. It can't be fixed by removing a few "bad apples" because the barrel itself is rotten. The entire system needs to be changed and redesigned before it can accurately be called a system for justice.
Right now, justice does not exist and can't exist within the current system.
