Law, Order and Justice

We are watching the same horror movie again. The senseless death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th has sparked nationwide protests and violence. Charges against one of the officers did not quell the outrage.  Calls to “crack down” followed.  It’s Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray all over again.  Nor is it always the police: Trayvon Martin was walking back from a convenience store and Ahmaud Arbery was just jogging in his neighborhood when both were set upon by those who took the law into their misguided hands.    

Adherence to the law, by protesters and in a courtroom, is certainly needed, but the underlying problem requires more.  Rightly we blame “bad apples.”  But when something keeps happening, we need to accept that more systemic causes are producing injustice.    

“Justice is the end of government,” James Madison said in 1788. The breakdown of civil order in so many cities is a cry for justice - not only for George Floyd but for the fate of far too many in our country. American government and society are stacked against them. 

Counting myself among the “reasonable, white middle class,” I’d prefer to believe that the path I’ve followed is open to everyone.  That’s fiction.  Those, especially but not only ethnic and racial minorities, who live in economically depressed urban and rural areas or on Native American reservations face cruel realities I’ve never experienced.  If you are such an African American, for example, and want to have a child, the chances that baby will die in infancy are twice as great as for a white child.  You will most likely have to raise that child amidst poverty, unable to afford a home since your chance to do so is only slightly more than half the chance of white parents.  Your income will be statistically just 60 percent of theirs.  Your child will most likely be in a run-down school, depending on a free lunch and getting a substandard education.   

If you live in an urban school district, the chance is high that your child will be exposed to a shooting or stabbing, with the attendant psychological toll, stress and impact on learning.  By the time your child is 16, the unemployment rate for black teens will probably still be more than 20 percent (it was 22 percent before the pandemic). Earning decent money at a respectable job, a key in acculturation and encouraging productive labor, will be a false promise.  I served on a federal drug/murder trial some years ago, at which witnesses noted that the people who make good money in the inner city are too often the ones selling drugs.    

Keeping your child healthy will be harder too. Health care will be less available, hard to afford, and access to healthy food will probably be limited where you live.   If you doubt this matters, note that disproportionately black counties account for only 30% of the population but 56% of COVID-19 deaths.  Black life expectancy is nearly five years less than that for whites.

Then of course you’d have to worry your child will get caught in the criminal justice system – ensnared in street crime, the subject of a hate attack, an innocent victim of gangs or racial profiling or illegally killed by police.  If arrested, your child is much more likely than a white child to go to jail on a plea bargain even if innocent, being unable to post bail or pay for a decent lawyer.

You will hear that if you only tried harder, got a better job, and lived somewhere else, life would be better.  Those who tell you this will not know that you may already work two jobs that don’t pay a living wage and that you can’t afford to move.  One hundred and fifty-five years after the end of slavery and 55 years after the end of legal segregation, you are still waiting for the promise of the Declaration of Independence to be fulfilled.  Blaming you will make some people feel better, but it will not produce justice. 

Blaming all the police will not produce justice either.  Most are good people, doing a dangerous job. They are in your neighborhood in spirit with those they are sworn to “protect and serve.”  Keep the recent images of many police officers taking a knee, marching with protesters, or hugging a protester in your mind.  

If anything can be gained from the death of George Floyd, it is the realization of how much work we must do to create a society without such tragedies.  Stopping excessive police violence against black men will be a start, but it must not be the end of providing justice for beleaguered Americans.

“Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said.  Reflecting on America’s history, he also noted that “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”   

Photo Credit: Julian Wan-unsplash.com