Preface: I know that the majority of
law enforcement officers are honest, hardworking good people who are out to
make a difference every day. To the great officers out there that I interact with – even occasionally – thank you for your service
in making our world a better place than we found it. As a former teacher, I
know what it is to have your chosen profession questioned daily and lumped into
one band of stereotypes. However, we do have some rogue cops who for one reason
or another think they are above the law or have an inferiority complex that has
never been truly dealt with who do sully the profession. This post (as with all
of my other blogs) are derived from my experiences, hopes, wishes, desires, and
more toward a more authentic equality than a colorblind system that tends to
avoid the pursuit of justice. If you don’t see color, then you certainly do not
see a Henderson State-educated 36-year-old husband, friend, co-worker,
neighbor, etc. as much more than another big black man with a deep voice.
Order rooted
and maintained by fear, intimidation, violence, brutality, and incarceration is
both cruel and immoral. Justice is order’s intended soul mate yet serving
justice is twice as hard as doling out fear. Black America knows this better
than anyone else with our twice-as-hard spirit: the one of having to work twice
as hard to even be considered, and often our reward is a menial prize that we
still have to fight tooth-and-nail for. If we’re satisfied with just getting in
the door, then we’ve lost our way. More so, having a few dollars, a house on
the hill, and being seen on television nightly does not mean the race is over;
instead, each can be considered a deterrent
thanks to the predatory nature of greed and power. While there is
nothing wrong with being able to provide a better lifestyle than the ones we
were afforded, do not let the titles and little bit of power fool you into
thinking this is what equality is about. If that is the case, then we have lost
our resolve to take the road less traveled a la Robert Frost and our
complacency will cost us dearly.
The legal
proceedings and maneuverings that have sparked protests in Ferguson, Sanford,
New York, Cleveland, and throughout our nation all expose our monumental failures
to build and protect the gains of our parents, grandparents, and countless
relatives won during the civil rights era. We know that not all of the evidence
presented in every case was legitimate, as are each grand jury’s members
truthful or representative of the communities they were commissioned to serve. What
price are we willing to pay for our children and next generation?
Toward the
end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned a Poor People’s
Campaign – a connection for the working-class with the African-American
twice-as-hard spirit designed to defend civil-rights legislation from
inevitable backlash. He visualized the poor, vulnerable; the downtrodden
unifying to uproot the political seeds deigned to grow income inequality.
Sadly, he was murdered before it came to fruition.
Unfortunately,
we are unaware the People’s Campaign was Phase 2 of a four-step civil rights
movement and further lost in the woods about Barry Goldwater’s emphasis of Law
and Order being the bedrock of pushback toward civil rights.
Law and
Order – the American political strategy of choice of the past fifty years – did
not put Goldwater in the White House. Historians know that he got his ass
handed to him by President Johnson, losing every state but Arizona, but his
emphasis is what brought President Nixon to the Oval Office and former actor
Ronald Reagan the California governorship in 1968. It also justified Nixon’s
War on Drugs, harsh sentencing requirements (crack offenders were locked up
twice as long as cocaine violators), the dehumanization of black offenders, the
Mulford Act of 1968, and the preference of order rooted in fear and punishment.
Law and Order also provided America’s mass incarceration. As a result, the ten
years of progress have produced at least a handful of useful laws that have
been thwarted by fifty years of legalized mass incarceration and inequality.
This is
segregation by incarceration (SBI), pitting the police vs. the African-American
community. No flyers, no press conferences for those who opposed the end of an
American apartheid system in Jim Crow, none of that. Segregation was not about
to lie down and concede defeat and pledge support for racial equality. Its
newer and not-so-evil-looking strategy was to take down the blatant whites-only
sign and trade them in for strategic enforcement of criminal laws that pack
poor people behind bars and inevitably break up the traditional pathways to
upward mobility.
SBI is much
worse and corrosive than Jim Crow ever was. One unintended benefit of Jim Crow
was it forced black people to build and rely on our own economic, educational,
and social systems. SBI is like diabetes – a silent killer with no benefits. It
extinguishes hope and in effect, litters society with a multitude of grown-up
boys who become parasitic not only on the affected families but also the areas
they live in. In short, segregation by incarceration has left African-Americans
distrustful of law enforcement via decimating the black family structure and
placing a cultural rot that prison culture and black culture are synonymous.
Once
capitalism got into the incarceration business, lawmakers and states began
racking up profits in untold dollars without mention of the lives damaged in
the process. Most states have private prisons which are often run more shoddily
than the worst state institutions in their heydays, and now even corporations
have thrown their hats in the ring employing people in the most dangerous
situations all in the name of saving money to have a cheap labor force! Where do
people get picked up? On the block, that’s where. The drug war has constructed
an environment conducive to prison life and the yards; think about the codes of
silence imposed.
Why did the
gangs accelerate in growth in California in the 1970s and ‘80s? Why was gangsta
rap born in Los Angeles?
Because
Ronald Wilson Reagan planted that seed of Law and Order in California first.
Aside from
Bernie Madoff, what happened to the white-collar thieves and corporate thugs
whose greed nearly destroyed the national economy and put a standstill to the
2008 presidential campaign? Most of them have their jobs and some are lobbyists
to the same lawmakers who turned a blind eye to their looting. Worse, Senator
Rand Paul (R-KY) has made a link that loose cigarettes are worth more than a
black man’s life – and this is what the Republican Party is trotting out for
President in the next cycle? In an act of bipartisanship, even our original
“first black president” Bill Clinton instituted draconian three strikes and
mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines as a measure to get Southern whites on
board with Law and Order. Look below and read the LBJ comment and tell me if
this is accurate.
I can’t
breathe, but you can’t see.
America is
still a place where race trumps self-interest, where the middle-class and poor
have more in common with each other than the one percenters we keep voting in.
Just as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson does not speak for all black people, I
would surely hope Rush Limbaugh and Tom Cotton are not representative of all
white people. I’ll trade you Charles Barkley and Ben Carson for Phil Jackson
and a pack of Ramen noodles (I jest), but you get the point. To maintain a
perceived superiority, some people are willing to lie on the grenade of unfair
justice in order to claim they are the chosen ones.
Why do you
not see? Is it because your rose-colored glasses are tinted to a prescription that
only limits to those inside of your immediate world? What about lumping all
people unlike yourselves to a neat little box (ex. my
black/white/gay/Asian/Hispanic/atheist/fill-in-the-blank friend)? Or does it
not matter because it isn’t in your homogeneous villages?
Justice is
not blind – history has proven that through the posthumous pardons and blank
apologies. America is not.
Open your
eyes.
