Tag Archive for 'crime'

The Racial Justice Act

Published by kotch on August 20, 2009 in In the News (National/International) and Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Gentle Reader,

We are just back from lots of travel, during which time our home state of North Carolina passed the “North Carolina Racial Justice Act.” The act allows prisoners facing a death penalty or those on death row to request a hearing before a judge, where they and others may produce evidence and sworn testimony that “race was a significant factor” in the decision to seek or impose a death sentence in their case. Here’s the bill. And Politics Daily has some nice coverage which gives a bit of context and links to this study by UNC-CH’s Isaac Unah and Jack Boger which makes a more than persuasive case that race is the single most important factor in the death penalty process in North Carolina.

It’s an interesting development (Kentucky is the only other state with such a provision), and one which could add another handicap to a death penalty system already weighed down by legal provisions and squabbles. North Carolina is already in a de facto death penalty moratorium, and this law adds another obstacle toward carrying out a sentence of death.

This kind of law, which backs away from the death penalty, tinkering with it in an effort to improve it, rather than addressing the fundamental questions behind it, though, is also the kind of law that allows the death penalty to persist. Will the Racial Justice Act dramatize the death penalty’s essential racist core? Or will it, if death sentences are upheld in these hearings, justify a deeply flawed system of lethal punishment?

And it is impossible not to offer a glimpse of some of the comments on the Politics Daily article, comments which well illustrate the nagging problem of race, and the way in which, as we’ve seen at these hijacked town hall meetings on health care, race bleeds into other political concerns in unpleasant ways:

  • “Black Racism at it’s finest. Allowing criminals to get lenient treatment because they black is just a continuation of the Obama racist agenda.”
  • “Its now time to step back and see who the real racist are. Its not the whites, Its the Blacks and the Mexcans. I have a booth at a flea market with the American flag in lights over it and I have seen that the mexicans won’t even come near it which is ok with me if thats the way they want to be.
    All I have seen and heard in my many years here on this earth has shown me and many others that most white people don’t want to be racist but are really not the given the chance by the Blacks and the mexicans, esp the illegal ALIENS.”

Henry Louis Gates: The Great Noticing

Published by kotch on July 28, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Gatesgate, the latest incident to pull back the veil on the persistence of racism, institutional and otherwise, in the United States, continues to draw a great deal of attention (especially with the release of the boring 911 transcript), among the latest this patently ridiculous article on which beer the President might choose when Henry Louis Gates and his arresting officer, James Crowley, meet at the White House for a drink. Will it be Crowley’s preferred Blue Moon (owned by the conservative Coors family)? Boston’s Sam Adams? Chicago’s Goose Island? Who cares?

Of more interest is, well, the amount of interest. Gates’s semi-celebrity and friendship with the President meant that we actually heard about this story, which most of the media agrees is a teachable moment (a google search for “henry louis gates” and “teachable moment” yields millions of results).

Opposing the ignorant but well-meaning people who have welcomed this latest reminder that we are not living in a post-racial society (and who may even think that would be a good thing), are people like James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal, who, if he had read William Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights might not have scolded Gates for being “uncivil.”

The nagging question is whether yet another teachable moment, if it remains a moment, is enough to teach white Americans that African Americans, especially men, experience suspicion by police and other authority figures all the time. As one author at The Root (an online magazine launched by Gates himself) put it:

It’s not a stretch for many white people, or black people for that matter, to visualize a young black man, especially one from an inner-city neighborhood or who is dressed a particular way (think baggy jeans, oversized T-shirt, baseball cap) getting stopped, questioned, arrested, etc., by white policemen. You’d have to live in a cave to not have witnessed this taking place at least once on the evening news, in movies, on streets and highways. What is harder for many white people to understand is that this happens all the time, to all sorts of black people, but particularly black men, no matter what they are wearing, no matter their station in life and no matter the kind of car they drive.

(It’s not just white police officers, either. Historian Eliot Rudnick wrote (in “The Negro Policeman in the South”) that when, after years of urging by black communities, black officers began to join police forces, they tended to treat black suspects more harshly than their white counterparts. Sometimes, white officers’ assumptions about black criminality actually made them more lenient; black officers’ frustration with black crime impelled them to react angrily.)

The treatment of African Americans by police officers remains hard for whites to understand because the wake-up calls come intermittently, after a nice snooze. Historians and other scholars of civil rights, who are beginning to take up this issue again, can play a part in keeping the rest of us awake.