Thankful?

I’ve continued to think about the death penalty since my last blog. Thanksgiving may seem an odd time to reflect on such a sobering subject, but frankly, I can’t think of a more appropriate time. For so many of us, the privileges afforded us because of accidents of birth - race, socio-economic status, location of birth, etc, - make it unlikely that we will experience the criminal justice system in a negative way. We privileged folks express our thanks for all that we have without seriously considering that our good fortune comes at the expense of others.

Whenever I hear someone argue that African Americans must be overrepresented in our prisons because, well, they just don’t respect the law or want to follow the law, I’m drawn back to a situation experienced by my niece. While being driven by her African American fiancé (now husband), in Winston Salem, their car was pulled over. The officer asked for ID, looked them up and down, and asked my niece if she were OK, as though obviously this man driving her must be forcing her, a Caucasian female, to be with him. The incident took place in the daytime on a major thoroughfare. If her fiancé had responded at all negatively to the stop, I can only imagine what the officer might have done; obviously he perceived a threat and it would have been a short walk from that expectation to finding a reason to give the driver some sort of ticket, or worse.

As long as situations like this continue to occur, we cannot, with any serious understanding, look at the disparity in use of the death penalty or even the basic functions of the criminal justice system, as anything other than racist. As long as that racism exists, we cannot blithely say that no innocent persons have been executed.

Likewise, we cannot look at the disparities in our criminal justice system honestly without asking ourselves what should be done to correct them. If I, a middle-class Caucasian female minister, were arrested under dubious circumstances, I could depend on any number of individuals and agencies coming to my aid. If the very same situation occurs with a young, low-income, African American male, too many people would just say, “Well, that’s just the way things are.”

Until we are willing to take a long, hard look at the racism that is still endemic to our culture, there are any number of persons whose lives will continue to be shattered by wrongful expectations or accusations.