Category: Justice

The Face of Racism…

.Reading time 6 minutes.
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Senator Rand Paul (R) Kentucky (c) US Senate

The face of racism is unassuming.  It is not an angry cropped hair white 20-something holding a torch screaming “you will not replace us!”  It is not a barrel-chested gun toting self-styled militia guy wearing a Confederate flag.  It is not the “Becky” or “Karen” calling the cops.  The face of racism is any white person in a position of power and influence who prioritizes their need to parse their interpretation of words over the lives of black people and other non-whites.

The Senate of the United States has been closer this year than ever to finally making lynching a federal crime [S. 488 – Information about the bill and its companion H.R. 35 – Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act].  It has already been passed by both houses.  This would create a law that makes lynching, of any kind, a federal crime.  This would be justice for every black person, every white person, every Latin-x person every, Native, Chinese, Japanese and Jewish person and every LGBTQ person who was ever lynched.  This would mean that when a gang of people hunt down and kill another transwoman of color, there would be some kind of federal recourse for their crimes that needs to be considered.  It would mean that that the gang rape, torture and murder of a woman who is trafficked would have larger consequences.  It would mean that a group of men, regardless of their professional position as police, when they detain and forcibly pin down an unarmed and compliant man and do not listen to his cries for air and he dies, would have a federal violation to answer for.  It would be justice for George Floyd.

But the Rand Pauls of the world are like too many white people that I’ve experienced when the conversation turns to codifying the definition of racism and creating substantive policy to prevent it.  They get uncomfortable.  They turn to wordsmithing in order to avoid “unintended consequences” and they reason for “common sense”.  Meanwhile, black people and those who do not benefit from whiteness, but who are always at its mercy, are forced to attend another senseless funeral, another tear streaked vigil, another protest, another march.  How dare anyone call for a “common sense” response to rampant, historical, lethal racism wielded as a bludgeon against innocent people?

I echo Senator Cory Booker’s statement in the clip below that there is nothing any white person can tell black people about lynching.  Senator Rand Paul is trying to “amend” this bill so that it is more “specific” and that someone can’t be accused of “lynching” by giving someone a ‘bruise’.  As Senator Kamala Harris says, this is offensive.  But what Paul is doing is actually straight out of the playbook of the Southern Democrats who blocked similar legislation from 1918 – 1922 (Dyer Anti Lynching Bill).  Too often when policies are crafted to deal with racism, white fragility rears its head and asks that these corrective measures “don’t go too far” and that they “show restraint” and that they don’t create a punishment worse than the crime.

There is no crime worse than racism that kills.  Racism is born of pure hatred and holds no redeeming or justifiable purpose.  Racism deserves no defense or assumption of innocence.  End racism.  Racism doesn’t see itself and it doesn’t hear itself.  Racism is a white ophthalmologist who stares blankly in the faces of two black attorneys and tells them about writing law.  Racism is a white man arguing publicly about race with three black people and defending what he knows about lynching.  Racism is a white guy talking about a bruise in a conversation that begins with the many ways black people have been hung, burned, disemboweled and castrated.  Given every opportunity in the world for redemption, apparently racism is also still the United States.

And sadly this seems to be Senator Rand Paul.  But he works for us.  Please let him know what you think.

I am urging all of my colleagues and friends in Kentucky to please call Senator Rand Paul’s Local and DC office to get him to withdraw his proposed amendment immediately and clear the way for this historic legislation.  The time is now.  End racism.  Senator Paul is literally holding the lynch pin that could put at least one piece of the racism of the United States in its long awaited grave.

Contact Senator Rand Paul

https://www.paul.senate.gov/connect/email-rand

Bowling Green
Main State Office
1029 State Street
Bowling Green, KY 42101
Phone: 270-782-8303

Washington DC
167 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington DC, 20510
Phone: 202-224-4343

Criminal? Justice?

.Reading time 5 minutes.
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Photo by Jacob Morch on Pexels.com

What if instead of building our civic order around “police” and “criminal justice” we actually built it around public safety?  As a progressive faith leader, I resent the idea of any autonomous human being “policed” and the assumption of a reciprocal relationship between “criminality” and “justice” seems inadequate at best.  These terms mutually reinforce the binaries of our culture around right and wrong, good and bad and they play into the tragic racial interpretation of a binary black and white in America.

With the depth and breadth of racism in our country, strategies that can ultimately fix the overwhelming impact of police violence against black people will need to factor in the ethical, moral and spiritual violence that racism has been for over 400 years.  Even if we never teach an ignorant white male cisgender police officer to recognize the humanity of a black trans woman (although I wish to God we could) our laws must represent her full humanity and protect her equally well.  Currently, they do not.  As long as we frame justice in the black and white terms of how one is policed or how someone is a criminal in contrast with innocent justice we will never have public safety in full nuanced color.

This is not a conversation for legislators to have alone.  Nor is it exclusively up to police forces who, nationwide are notoriously bad at policing themselves.  In fact, this is not a conversation.  It is a national reckoning and a cultural reconciliation.  It is first a reckoning in that the exchange must take full accountability for the way racism has both been a motivator for and a result of policing.  In a nation that has even within my lifetime struck down laws that “policed” people’s movement based on their race[1], real change means coming to terms with the ways in which non-white Americans have been herded, punished, abused and manipulated like sub humans with no agency.  It is a reconciliation in that reform must not simply erase all efforts at public safety.  There should be a way to deal with people who commit grievous acts against one another, abuses, violence etc.  But that system must not have any trace of the racist assumptions that assign guilt based on skin color, phenotype, sexual and gender orientation and other factors that we call “marginal”.  More importantly, it must not offer varying degrees of safety solely based on the proximity one has to whiteness.  We must all have access to safety.

This type of change can be led by faith leaders.  We are people who study and interpret and untangle the ancient violent history of Roman oppression, the Ottoman Empire, the Egyptian enslavement of the Israelites, and more current crimes of Jim Crow, lynching, Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment and our modern immigration debacle.  We are trained to deal with the human condition in real time.  Our perspective is unique and crucial.  Our job should not just be to pray after the fact of tragedy.  We are also called in our leadership to offer prophetic insight that points to the consequences of being out of covenant with our fellow beings.  One thing is sure, whether you identify with a faith tradition or not, the question of dismantling what we have come to accept as police and criminal justice must begin with wrestling deeply with moral and ethical questions of humanity or it simply devolves into negotiating degrees of what becomes for some, martial law.

It is time for faith leaders to raise their voices and help re-imagine and advocate for a public safety policy built on human equity not on racist misconceptions of assumed guilt and racist cultural tropes.  With the question of policing and criminal justice being an issue of human dignity and quite simply an issue of life and death, there is no faith “leader” in this moment who can afford to follow.

[1] https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-codes