The Onion Reflected in Class

The other day I was looking at videos on The Onion's website.  The Onion is a news station that broadcasts fake news stories in order to satirise the government, legal system or pop culture.  While most of the news stories that they show are hilarious, they all have a backing of some truth.  I was specifically struck by a video entitled "Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult".  The video describes a young teenage girl who is tried for a brutal murder of her classmate.  The judge decides to try her as "a three-hundred pound black male" and the jury should imagine her as such.  The photo below stuck me in a similar way as the video.

Although this video and photo were comical there was a strong undertone of truth of a sometimes racist justice system.  In class we have talked a lot about African Americans in the justice system during Reconstruction projects and during our TV tokenism discussions.  

During our plans for Reconstruction, many of the groups decided that in the justice system in that era, there should be separate judges and juries for tried African Americans.  They believed that the separate legal systems would provide a non racial bias justice.  But the groups made clear that this would be a temporary practice, till after America could move past racism.  But as shown in the onion video above, is America at the point that the Reconstruction groups expected?  If this practice had been put into use would it have ended by now?  Is the justice system in America unbiased racially?

During the TV tokenism discussion with Mr. Bolos and Mr. O'Connor we discussed how blacks in television shows often play the role of "authority minority", commonly a judge.  They do this in order to dispel stereotypes of African Americans as the onion video depicts them.  Does the TV token African American judge successfully negate these stereotypes?  How is this reflected in our justice system?