Show these two headlines to anyone who says America doesn't have a race problem

The US has an uncomfortable history where race relations are concerned and it continues to haunt the country to this day.

According to the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), African Americans constitute “nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population”. The disparity in prisons is just one indication of the racial inequality in the US.

Donald Trump’s election has been celebrated by a number of far-right groups – including the Ku Klux Klan – and racially motivated hate crime spiked - with 900 incidents in the 10 days following his victory.

Why do we bring this up? Well, recently, a pair of reporters made headlines in the States for endangering a child.

Tucson reporters Krystin and Somchai Lisaius's four-month-old daughter was found with cocaine in her system after the pair admitted to taking the class A drug at a party the night before.

The mother thought that the drug would be out of her system twelve hours later, and breast fed her child, who ended up hospitalised.

The pair were given a 30 day jail sentence, which was suspended, and one year probation.

One Twitter user pointed out the hypocrisy of a suspended sentence, by comparing the incident with another.

Laura Browder was arrested last year for child abandonment after she left her six-year-old daughter and two-year-old son in Memorial City Mall food court in Houston, Texas, near McDonald's and went for a job interview nearby.

She claimed that she was only 30 feet from them, and could see them the entire time.

Her children were eventually returned to her, but she had reportedly been investigated by child protective services. According to some reports, she had spent a short time in jail.

Many people are claiming that her race played a part in her criminalisation, and according to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, one in eighteen black women are incarcerated in the US, in comparison to one in 111 white women.

People on Twitter are pointing out the irony:

And calling out what they perceive as bias in the justice system

But not everyone agrees that it's a race problem, and some argue that it's a class disparity

This isn't the first time race was pointed out as an issue when reporting crime. Many criticised the way the Brock Turner case was reported, and the fact that many news outlets used his university photo, rather than his mug shot in articles about him.

More: The two headlines that tell you everything about racism in America

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