Responsibility to Ensure Rights and Equal Treatment: Analytical Essay

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Whose responsibility is it to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally? This is a widely asked question and one that is becoming more and more relevant in today’s day and age. There is currently a high level of injustice relating to African American lives, as a spotlight has been shined on the issue of racial equality. So, whose responsibility is it? It is the president, policemen, and our own responsibility to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally.

First, it is the president’s responsibility to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally. It is common knowledge that after a law is passed, the president has the right to approve or veto the law. Laws are what give us our rights, and ensure we are treated equally, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which stated many things, including that no one receiving federal funding could discriminate racially. So, the president is allowed the main control of whether the laws that are passed encourage equal rights. In Ta-Neshi Coates’s essay, Letter To My Son, there is the quote, “The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you,” This shows how the current laws don’t protect the African American’s rights, and the current ones are “ an excuse for stopping and frisking you.” One of the main jobs of the president, as previously mentioned, is to ensure that all laws passed are just, and in that job, the president can think about possible good or bad effects of the law. If the president feels that the law could just be used as an excuse to harass, then he/she can and should veto it and send it back to Congress, telling Congress what he/she thinks should be altered. Altogether, it is the president’s job to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally by vetoing laws that he/she thinks could be used as an excuse to harass people, and by approving laws that he/she thinks could be beneficial to everyone.

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In addition to the president, it is also the police officer’s responsibility to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 title VI, police officers, or anyone else receiving federal funding, can’t discriminate against someone because of their race. So, this means that the policemen are legally bound to not discriminate based on race. A job requirement is to treat everyone civilly regardless of their skin color. Police officers have a responsibility to treat everyone equally and enforce equal rights through the law. While the president can control which laws stay active, the police officer’s job is to ensure that those laws are followed. Their job is also to ensure that they enforce these laws the same way among African Americans and white people. A quote from Taneshi Coates’ essay A Letter to My Son says, “ To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us.”(Coates, 2) This shows how African Americans aren’t trusting the law and feel this way because they are black. This distrust is from prior instances where other African Americans were discriminated against by police officers, which has been against the law since 1964. In conclusion it is against the law for police officers to discriminate, and it is their responsibility to enforce equal rights.

Finally, it is our own responsibility to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally. Like the quote from Ta-neshi Coates’s essay Letter To My Son, “And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements.” This shows how the individual person is responsible for the victims of policemen. Each person must stand up for those victims, and fight for justice not only for them, but for others that were wronged in the past. Another quote that shows how we need justice and is a call for help to attain it is from Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes, “The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free.” This shows how not every man feels they are free in America, and it needs to become that way. Hughes is calling out to the reader of this letter, the common folk, asking them to help America become America again, and for everyone to be free. Another quote from the same poem states, “Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.” This is another quote that is great at showing how we all made America, so it is our responsibility to reset our minds and goals to make America how it was supposed to be. This shows how everyone is included in this fight for equality and how our hopes for America were very different from how America currently is. All in all, it is our responsibility to fight for not only our rights and equality, but for everyone’s.

In summary, there are lots of ways to achieve equality. It is the president, policemen, and our own responsibility to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally. That means that everyone, including yourself, is responsible for fighting for equality. Now, I want you to think, are you doing your job to ensure we have our rights and are treated equally?

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