This week a show I really like on Netflix called One Day at a Time covered a few pretty heavy topics, but the main one that stood out was the topic of certain races being treated differently when it comes to crime and punishment. In the episode titled “Nip it in the bud” the mother, Penelope, gave her son Alex permission to go to a concert festival called Bud E. fest, the issue was that she didn’t know the festival was a marijuana-based music festival. In the episode, she finds out the information and she talked to Alex about using marijuana and he tells her that that was the first time that he had ever tried it and that he didn’t like it and Penelope seemed to accept this information and punishes him in a normal way. Later in the episode, however, we see Penelope go to her women veteran mental health group and they tell her that he was most likely lying about the marijuana and tell her that she should search his room just in case he had any more that he was planning on using. She searches his room and finds some weed in a fake body spray can and she confronts him and they have a real conversation about the negative effects of drug use. Alex chooses to defend himself and say that it’s legal and he only does it sometimes, and Penelope retorts that he’s only 15 and the marijuana is something that can hurt him a lot at the stage of development his brain is at. Penelope goes on to talk about how there is also the added issue of race in this because Alex is Latino and will have a higher chance of being charged than the white friends he was smoking with; here Penelope goes into a story about how she and her friends were caught smoking weed on a beach and the officer that arrested them let her white friend go while still arresting her and the only reason she was let go was because there happened to be a Latino cop around to help her out. The episode ends in a very wholesome family sitcom manner where Alex and Penelope talk about the keeping this information away from ‘Abuelita’ because they know they would get in serious trouble if she found out, but you really get from this episode that Alex learned a lesson from Penelope’s story and he is genuinely rethinking his choices.
This episode played more into more of the topics of chapter six a little, but all in all, it turned itself into a good topic or this weeks blog post. The way that Penelope had been treated when she was younger and was caught smoking weed by a police officer was completely unfair and was entirely based on her race because she was not white. Her white friend got off of the same charges she had to get saved from and it was all because of racial discrimination. This wasn’t discussed in this episode but in past episodes, there has been a lot of talk about how Alex is not a white-passing latino and how he has faced discrimination and bullying for that in the past which would most likely make the situation worse if he had been caught. There has also been talk of how Schnider, the families landlord and friend, had previously had drug problems, but they never talk about him having any real legal repercussions because he is white and comes from a rich family, but had he been a not white male he might have not of fared so well. The point is that Alex could have had some serious negative legal effects because of his race because systematically people of color are punished more frequently than white people for the same crimes
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Brenna Sociology 107 