Should justice be colorblind?

By Melanie Ford

Zenith City Weekly

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Twice in my 40–plus years of driving, I have been pulled over. In driver’s ed, I didn’t learn the protocol for when this happens. I guess they figured I’d do what they taught and wouldn’t have to worry about being pulled over.

The first time it happened, I sat in my car for a moment, but the officer didn’t get out of his vehicle. I thought he was waiting for me to go see him, so I did.

He pulled out a megaphone and said, "Ma’am, get back in your car immediately."

Wow, that was scary. So I learned: You wait for the officer to come to you.

I have since learned that my Latino and African–American friends do teach their kids what to do when they are pulled over because they are frequent targets of "DWB," Driving While Black/Brown.

They teach their kids how to dress and smile for their driver license photos; how to walk down the street to blend in; how not to run out of a store, even if they are so happy about the new toy their parents just bought that they can’t wait to play with it.

I feel helpless when my friends say their daily lives are a struggle. I listen to them and try to be supportive. I want to tell others. I want our community to change.

In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [New Press, 2010], Michelle Alexander concludes that the "war on drugs" was initiated, in part, by white elites for political and economic gain, resulting in the incarceration of black and brown men at rates far exceeding that of whites.

Similar to slavery and "Jim Crow" segregation laws, the government created and continues to sanction a new caste system behind the cloak of colorblindness.

Alexander’s premise has been laughed off as a conspiracy theory and she admits she was skeptical of any intentionality before beginning her research.

After the Civil War, blacks held 15 percent of elected positions in the South. By 1870, they owned businesses and were gaining education and wealth.

Southern whites were outraged and criminalized vagrancy. If you didn’t have a job—which many displaced freedmen didn’t—you were vagrant. Convicts were assigned forced labor, a new legal form of slavery.

Jim Crow laws drove a wedge between poor whites and blacks. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dismantled discrimination, conservative whites searched for a race–neutral way to maintain the racial hierarchy.

Civil rights demonstrations created the new discourse: "Law and order" was needed because integration threatened higher crime rates.

Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all deliberately pursued a racial strategy to gain southern and white swing voters. Their war on drugs, tough–on–crime stance, and welfare reform policies portrayed black and brown people as criminals, drug lords, and welfare queens.

Legislators passed punitive criminal laws and federal agencies exponentially increased funding to local law enforcement, boosting their presence in disadvantaged neighborhoods to levels never seen prior to the 1980s.

In the next two decades, the prison population increased fourfold. Now, a third of young African–American men are under the control of corrections.

Alexander posits that these policies and practices resulted in the intentional creation of an underclass, this time not based on race, but on felony status. Police round up suspects for forfeiture money and continued federal grants. Courts convict and impose harsh sentencing in the name of public safety.

The combination results in invisible punishments—inability of offenders to access public housing, education, and employment; suspension of the rights to vote and serve on a jury; regulation of movement; etc.

Colorblindness, premised on a belief that we can’t be trusted to see race and still treat each other fairly, creates indifference.

Alexander provides some solutions, not all of them easy: To talk about race, to understand racial history, to realize that our racial resentments and economic insecurities are exploited for political gain, and to see race.

According to 2010 census data and the Minnesota Department of Corrections, whites constitute 85.3 percent of the state’s general population, but 53 to 54 percent of inmates. Blacks constitute 5.2 percent of the general population, but 35 to 36 percent of inmates. The number one offense of conviction is drugs.

By understanding the history laid out by Alexander and this data, I can better relate to my friends of color. I can empathize with their struggles, use my voice to make others aware, and advocate for change.

Melanie Ford is a lawyer in Duluth. She is on the Board of Directors of Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial, Inc. and a community representative on the steering committee of the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. Both groups work to eliminate racism and the disparate impact of political, social, and governmental policies on people of color.

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