So let me see if I understand what just happened…
- Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City police officer in July
- The NYC Police Department prohibits the use of choke holds
- Garner’s death was ruled a homicide
- and the grand jury will not indict the officer involved.
Is that about it?
“Again the system has failed us. “How? How? I don’t know how.”
– Jewell Miller, who has an infant daughter with Eric Garner.
All true. A New York grand jury failed to indict white police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choke-hold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, this past July. Sadly, I’m not surprised. After the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri failed to indict white police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, another unarmed black man, it’s what I expected.
And black people across the United States are reconfirmed in the knowledge that their lives are less valuable than the lives of white people. The lack of trust in law enforcement by black people grows stronger. And many white folks don’t understand. And the wide gulf between us grows wider; seemingly insurmountable.
There are questions about racism, about the treatment of people of color within and by the criminal justice system, about the legacy of slavery (which this is), that we as a nation – particularly white people – have so far been unwilling to seriously ponder. As long as white people avoid answering these difficult questions, what happened to Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and so many others, will happen again. And again. And again…
Questions such as:
- Why are Michael Brown and Eric Garner dead at the hands of police while white suspects Jared Loughner (who killed 6 and injured 13 at a political rally) and James Holmes (who killed 10 and injured 58 at a movie theater) were not shot and killed by police, but apprehended to stand trial?
- Why do young black males face a 21-times-greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts?
- Why are black people 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people despite comparable usage rates?
- Why do people of color make up 60% of American prison population while representing only 30% of the general population?
These questions, if confronted honestly, should be deeply unsettling to white people because they go to the core of the “system” of criminal justice. The “system” is racist. People of good will may claim there is no intention to be unfair, unequal and racist, but intentions don’t matter. Outcomes matter. Do you suppose the fact that the Ferguson police force is 95% white while the general population of Ferguson is 67% black impacts the outcomes in the community?
The outcomes require Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; a must-read for any white person who wants to understand systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system) to give her young son “the talk” about growing up black in the United States.
“My son wants an answer. He is 10 years old, and he wants me to tell him that he doesn’t need to worry. He is a black boy, rather sheltered, and knows little of the world beyond our safe, quiet neighborhood. His eyes are wide and holding my gaze, silently begging me to say: No, sweetheart, you have no need to worry. Most officers are nothing like Officer Wilson. They would not shoot you — or anyone — while you’re unarmed, running away or even toward them.
“I am stammering.”
I never even thought about having to teach my children:
“If the police stop you, I need for you to be humble. But I need more than that. I need for you to be prepared to be humiliated.”
I never thought about needing to teach such things to my children because the “system” is designed in favor of me and my children because we are white. And until white people begin to acknowledge, understand, and confront racism in our criminal justice system, the gulf between white and black Americans will continue to grow. And we will NOT be safer with more laws, more guns, and more militarized police forces. We will be safer when we confront and eradicate systemic racism.
My heart is heavy tonight. I fear for my nation. I hope for healing, yet I am pessimistic. I continue to work for healing and hope more and more white people will join the struggle, yet I fear we will not overcome the hatred and the fear and the traumatic wounds we have been inflicting on our brothers and sisters for centuries.
What do you think? Anyone see any justice on the horizon? Anyone more hopeful than I am? I’d love to hear why…
anyone?
There should be a automatic "Lie Detector Test" when murder is involved. Only then will we learn the true intention.
I go back and forth between deep sadness and outrageous anger. I am sick of so many white people I know saying there is no problem. Sometimes I just literally wish the table was turned and they could live a life in a black man's shoes. I am a bit hopeful as I see people all over the country take to the streets and protest. I just don't want it to be for one horrible incident though. I want it to be for our whole society and for systemic change.
Thank you Tom for your words, for asking hard questions that deserve and require an answer from white people. As a white person I find it incredulous that other white people refuse to recognize that race matters. I have observed this first hand. It is a defense mechanism but it is an uncompassionate reaction instead of a reasoned response. Keep up the good work. Keep writing words that push us and prod us and make us look in the mirror. Next week we light the candle of the prophets, the candle of peace in church for Advent. I thank God for your prophetic witness.
While I agree with almost all of your observations, I struggle with the conclusion that it is a structural problem. I think it is a people problem. No matter what structure we have to deal with this issue, deciding whether to criminally prosecute someone in this circumstance, the structure will consist of people. The decisions will be made by people. Is the problem the structure, the "system," or the people?
I don't like or respect the conclusions of the grand juries. They are wrong. Isn't this just like the election results we just observed? If some voters sometimes make stupid choices, does that mean we stop having elections? If some grand jurors sometimes make stupid choices, do we abolish grand juries?
Without question, there are many flaws in any of these government structures and systems. No matter what the structure or system is, won't the elements of the system be people? If the people are flawed, if the people have racist impulses or other kinds of bad judgment, shouldn't we expect the results to sometimes be incorrect? Is the problem the structure or the system, or the racist potential of the people in it? Should we be blaming some an abstract entity, the system, when there is no better alternative structure?
I dislike, disagree with and disrespect the conclusions of these grand juries. I see no alternative to having the decisions made by prosecutors and grand juries. If prosecutors and grand jurors are people, they will sometimes have human flaws. Is there any organizational structure of humans that will always arrive at the correct conclusions? Should we be blaming the "structure" or the "system"? Is that reasonable?
Or should we be looking into our hearts and accepting responsibility for our own human flaws? As Walt Kelly said so eloquently:
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
I'm not sure we're in disagreement, Lee. It may be semantics, I don't know. I believe without the slightest doubt that the system/structure is racist. The system/structure is designed to benefit people who look like me over people of color. That system/structure was designed and continues to be supported/perpetuated by human beings – as you say. The enemy is indeed us. Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) wrote on her Facebook page: "The American Justice System Is Not Broken. It is doing precisely what it is designed to do. The sooner we wake up to this reality, the sooner we can get to work building the kind of movement that holds real promise of transforming not only our "justice" system but the American culture that created it. The system does not need to be "fixed". It is not broken. It needs to be dismantled and replaced or utterly transformed. The only remaining question – after all that we've seen – is whether we are willing to speak the truth, face our history, and finally put an end to our nation's history and cycle of creating these caste-like, dehumanizing, race-based systems in America." The article she referred to is here: http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-american-jus…
Perhaps we are using "system" or "structure" to refer to different things. I am not sure.
If a drunk drives a truck into a crowd killing several people and injuring dozens, is do we blame the design of the truck or the fact that the driver is drunk?
If the truck driver is a white racist determined to kill blacks and drives a truck into a crowd of blacks, is the problem the design of the truck or the fact that the driver is a racist murderer?
If racist people use a grand jury to perpetuate injustice, is the problem with the grand jury system or the racist jurors?
I very much want a solution. How do we keep juries from doing racist things?
I am not a fan of grand juries. I am thinking the same thing about grand juries that many political scientists say about democracy: it is the least efficient form of government but it is better than the alternatives. What are the alternatives?
I share your outrage and frustration with the outcomes of the grand juries. The conclusions of the criminal justice system in these cases are clearly wrong and incorrect. They are racist. I guess my instinct is that the problem is with the people in the system, not with the system design. I could be wrong, but that is my instinct. Help me recognize how I am wrong in this case. I don't see it.
If a racist drove a truck into a crowd of blacks and killed several, I assume we can agree that the act was evil. Can one conclude that the design of the truck is also bad, because it fails to prevent the driver from doing evil things with it? Is that a truck design flaw, a system flaw? My instinct is that it is just a bad driver. How am I wrong?
I'll try a different analogy. Imagine a plumber who installs pipes in the ground beneath homes and businesses that distribute water and waste to and from those buildings. The pipes are buried. We don't think about them. We just turn on the faucet or flush the toilet and trust the plumbing "system" to do its work. If the plumbing "system" in town is designed so that some people get cleaner water than others because it goes through extra filters before it gets to their house, then the system benefits those people with extra filters. It doesn't make the pipes or the filters fair or unfair (racist or not) but they are part of a system that advantages some over others, perhaps because they have more money to pay for the extra filters. There may be all sorts of reasons people site why some people get cleaner water than other people do, but the outcome is better for some people and worse for others and it is part of the plumbing system. Same thing with criminal justice. When the "war on drugs" began under Nixon, our government began building a "system" whereby there are distinct advantages and disadvantages that people experience based upon the color of their skin. You may conclude that such discrimination is all about racist police, judges, parole boards, prisons, etc., but I see a criminal justice "system" that was designed like the plumbing in that town where I get extra filters and black and brown folks don't. Are there racist individuals that designed the system? Absolutely. Once the system is in place and expands and gets perpetuated so completely, it no longer matters much what individual racists or non-racists do. The system is in place. Look at the outcomes. Black and white people use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, but black people are arrested, charged, prosecuted, and imprisoned at significantly higher rates than white people. And we get used to the system and we are subjected to police and media stories regularly that the black man who was killed by a police officer in Ferguson was a thug and the white kid who murdered all the school children in Connecticut was mentally ill and nobody thought such a thing could happen. That's a racist system… perpetrated by racist people AND perpetrated by well-meaning people who don't see the system for what it is. And whether this persuades you or not regarding "systems" versus individual people being racist; with so many people perpetrating inequality and racism, don't they comprise a "system" of sorts? Mostly, I hope you'll take some time with Michelle Alexander's book. You might also appreciate "Slavery By Another Name" – which describes how, after slavery ended at the conclusion of the Civil War, governments (local and federal) conspired to create a criminal justice system to incarcerate black men in ways that accomplished the same result as slavery. However you want to ascribe racism/inequality to individuals, like the drunk in the truck, it's a system that encourages a LOT of drunks to get into a LOT of trucks. That's a system.
I agree with the substance of almost all of your statements. I suspect that I see different solutions and have some concerns about approaching the problem as a problem with the criminal justice system.
The drunks are not just driving trucks and encouraging a lot of other drunks to drive a lot of other trucks. The drunks are performing surgeries, teaching classes, running our economy, deciding where factories will be built and who can have jobs, and running every other system in the country. The racist results are not limited to the criminal justice system. I fear that they are pervasive at most levels of society and in most of our endeavors.
I fear that fixes focused solely on the criminal justice system might create a whole host of other problems. My greater fear is that doing so will merely postpone the time we pay attention to much larger issues including the problems with our education system, our economic system, our healthcare system, and our legal system that determine issues that affect more people than those charged in crimes, e.g. workplace discrimination issues. The problem is much larger than the criminal justice system. The problem is us, all of us.
"The racist results are not limited to the criminal justice system. I fear that they are pervasive at most levels of society and in most of our endeavors." I agree, Lee. Hence the systemic, structural, pervasive nature of the challenge. The issue I raised with this particular post was with the criminal (so called "justice") system in response to recent issues in Ferguson and New York. You rightly point out that the "SYSTEM" covers virtually every measurable social indicator… nationally, culturally, and individually. What a system!