America’s Crime

Against Its Own Humanity

By Hank Edson

We are a nation and a culture recklessly out of balance in many more ways than one. I will not count the ways here, but will say that in addition to war, the criminal abuse of our political process by our executive branch, and global warming, we also have our own deep seated racism still twisting our American soul and we must not ignore it in the coming presidential campaign.

Now, as always, but now more than ever, it is a time when we must try once more to look at our own moral culpability as a society straight on. Lately, reality has been challenging us to do this, but we have been resisting with all the determination of a corporate media intent on discussing O.J. Simpson rather than focus on what happened in Jena. Jena is a challenge for us to look at ourselves more honestly, a challenge to look more thoroughly, more deeply into just how strong our racism remains inside us.

Jena

In case you are unfamiliar with what happened in Jena, let me quote to you the story as told by journalist Gary Younge:

“Fittingly for a post-civil rights story, it began with the discrepancy between what you are allowed to do and what you can do. In August last year, Kenneth Purvis asked the principal at Jena High School if he could sit under the “white tree”–a place in the school courtyard where white students hung out during break. The principal said Purvis could sit where he liked. So the next day he went with his cousin Bryant and stood under the tree. The morning after that three nooses dangled from the tree.”

“The overwhelmingly white school board judged the nooses a youthful prank and punished the culprits with brief suspensions. Black parents and students were angry, and months of racial tension followed. Police were called to the school several times because of fights between black and white students.”

“The principal called an assembly at which the local district attorney, Reed Walters, warned, “See this pen? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen.” The black students say he was looking at them when he said it; Walters denies it.”

“In an unsolved arson case, a wing of the school was burned down. A few days later, Justin Sloan, a white man, attacked black students who tried to go to a white party in town. Sloan was charged with battery and put on probation. A few days after that a white boy pulled a gun on three black students in a convenience store. One of the black students wrestled the gun from him and took it home, only to find himself charged with theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery and disturbing the peace. The white student who produced the gun was not charged.”

“On December 4, in school, a group of black students attacked a white student, Justin Barker, after they heard him bragging about a racial assault his friend had made. Barker, 17, had a concussion and his eye was swollen shut. He spent a few hours in the hospital and on his release went to a party, where friends described him as ‘his usual smiling self.’”

“The six black students were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder–a charge that requires the use of a deadly weapon. Walters argued that the sneakers used to kick Barker were indeed deadly weapons. Mychal Bell, 17, became the first of what are now known as the Jena Six to be convicted on reduced charges by an all-white jury, and he faced up to twenty-two years in jail. His black court-appointed attorney called no witnesses and offered no defense. Bell’s conviction was overturned by an appeals court, which ruled that he shouldn’t have been tried as an adult. At the time of this writing he sits in jail waiting to hear his fate, and a huge civil rights march is set to descend on Jena.” [i]

It’s hard to give credence to the District Attorney Walter’s denial that he didn’t direct his words toward the black students as an overtly racist threat. His subsequent use of his prosecutorial discretion to charge black students with crimes more serious than they committed and to charge white students with crimes less serious than they committed made his intentions clear enough.

Although the Jena story began with the old symbolism of the ugly South, the noose, the D.A. Walter’s words at the school assembly testified to a newer type of lynching that has evolved: the legal lynching, the stroke of the pen rather than the lash of the whip.

Basically, there are two kinds of legal lynching: school and prison. The former flows into the latter. When the District Attorney in Jena tells a gymnasium full of kids that he can end their life with a stroke of his pen, he is describing something that happens throughout America wherever black children are born poor. First they are legally required to go to school, then they are segregated through legal funding structures that make it impossible to challenge the racism of the system in court, then they are schooled in poverty, callousness, and neglect, and then they are enrolled in the prison system.

An Apartheid Education System

Harvard political scientist Jennifer Hochschild and Princeton education policy instructor Nathan Scovronick, have described public education nationwide as a “systematic and pervasive denial to poor (and disproportionately non-white) children of the chance to get a good education.” [ii] Georgetown University Law Professor Sheryll Cashin’s sums up the failure of integration in public education, noting: “Black and brown public schools children are now more segregated than at any time in the past thirty years. Typically they are relegated to high-poverty, racially identifiable schools that offer a separate and unequal education.” [iii] As of 2000, black and Latino students typically attended schools where 44 percent of the student body lived at or below the poverty line. White students by contrast typically attended schools where only 19 percent of the students lived in poverty. Seventy-five percent of black students go to schools that are more than half black and Latino. By contrast, on average, white students go to schools that are 80% white. The end result is that schools are more segregated racially and socio-economically than they have been in almost four decades. [iv] Where the poor and minority are born into a highly inequitable society and then subject to a racist and unequal school system, the young find no opportunity, but only desperation.

In 2005’s The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol provides a detailed look at the systematic way in which poor black and Hispanic children have been segregated in inner city schools across America and subjected to dehumanizing curriculum that amounts to little more than animal conditioning. At the back of the book, Kozol provides charts showing a consistent correlation between per pupil spending discrepancies and discrepancies in the racial and socio-economic composition of the student body. In Chicago during the 2002-2003 school year, in communities where black or Hispanic students made up only 10 percent of the population and only 8 percent of the population was low income, per pupil spending was $17,291 per student. In the inner city, however, where the communities were 87 percent black or Hispanic and 85 percent were low income, the per pupil spending was only $8,482. That same year in Philadelphia, where black and Hispanic students made up only 9 percent of the student population and only 4 percent were low income, the per pupil spending was $17,261. Where the minority population was 79 percent and the low income population was 71 percent, per pupil spending was only $9,299. Similar patterns existed likewise in Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee and New York. Kozol’s survey did not extend beyond these metropolitan areas.

Kozol writes of a fifteen year-old girl from Harlem who explained the segregated inequity she and her school mates suffered in this way: “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.” When asked if she thought there wasn’t room in America for children of her race, her friend replied, “Think of it this way, if people in New York woke up one day and learned we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?” Kozal asked the girl how she thought they’d feel. “I think they’d be relieved,” was her answer.

Economic Inequity and Lack of Opportunity

In 2004, United for a Fair Economy published a report called, “The State of the Dream 2004.” The study found that the unemployment rate among African Americans had more than doubled in a single year, rising from 5.2 percent in 2003 to 10.8 percent in 2004. [v] In New York, the Community Services Society reported in 2007 that a shocking 40 percent of all black men in the city were jobless. [vi] Senator Chuck Shumer recently conducted a congressional hearing which found that unemployment among black high school drop outs varied from between 59 to 72 percent over the last few years. White high school drop outs, by contrast, were only experiencing 29 percent unemployment rates. [vii]

Currently, blacks and are four times more likely than Whites to be poor. [viii] The average household wealth of blacks remained in 2004 only 16 percent of the average household wealth held by Whites. [ix] A 2004 Washington Post article reports that “As of 2002, …the median Hispanic household had a net worth of $7,932 and the median black family had $5,998, meaning that half of the households in those groups had less and half had more. The median white family, by contrast had more than 10 times either amount—$88,651. Nearly a third of blacks and over a quarter of Hispanic households had zero or negative worth in 2002, compared with 13 percent of whites. The net worth of Hispanic and black households fell 27 percent from 1999 through 2001, while white household wealth rose 2 percent during the same period….” The Post article also notes that fewer than half of blacks and Hispanics own their own homes, compared with nearly three-quarters of whites.” [x]

Cashin cites a study of poor people and poor neighborhoods in Washington D.C. that concludes:

“There is growing evidence that when poverty rates exceed 30 percent, neighborhoods have great difficulty sustaining the economic and civic institutions essential for a healthy community. Poor education, joblessness, teen parenthood, discrimination, and crime all reinforce one another…creating a vicious cycle of poverty, inequality, isolation and distress.” [xi]

Cashin sums up the relationship between race and the stark contrast in suburban versus inner-city realities by noting that over 70 percent of whites live in suburbs, and that according to the 2000 Census, “the average white person in America lived in a neighborhood that was 80 percent white.” [xii]

America's Racist Gulags

In the inner city, where education is injurious, jobs are unavailable, and wages are a small fraction of what most others earn, the results are predictable. Large numbers of black men have been caught up in the economy of small-time drug dealing, which our racist criminal justice system has inappropriately targeted in its “War on Drugs.”

Marc Mauer and Kara Gotsch report that “[w]hile the federal courts are normally expected to focus on high-level drug operations, nearly three-quarters of federal crack cocaine defendants have only low-level involvement in drug activity, such as street-level dealers, couriers or lookouts.” [xiii] The inappropriate targeting of economically stranded street peddlers is only the beginning of discrimination waged against impoverished youths struggling in an economy that refuses to acknowledge their humanity. “ According to the Justice Department, blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to have their cars searched when they are pulled over and more than twice as likely to be arrested. They are more than five times as likely as whites to be sent to jail and are sentenced to 20 percent longer jail time.” [xiv]

Mandatory sentencing guidelines also discriminate between crack cocaine used in the inner city and powder cocaine used by more affluent abusers in the middle and upper class. To trigger the minimum five-year sentence, the user of powder cocaine must be caught with 100 times more coke than the user of crack, even though the drugs are pharmacologically identical. [xv]

Average sentences for people convicted of a crack cocaine offense are three and a half years longer than the average sentences of those convicted of a powder cocaine offense, two years longer than those convicted of a methamphetamine offense, and five years longer than those convicted of a heroine offense. Again, Mauer and Gotsch report: “The crack penalties are the main cause of a 77 percent increase in the average federal prison time served by African Americans for a drug offense between 1994 and 2003, compared to an increase of 28 percent for white drug offenders.” [xvi] Between 1995 and 2007, the Sentencing Commission has asked Congress three times to fix unfair sentencing disparity for offenses involving Crack Cocaine, but the Republican controlled congress has ignored these pleas. [xvii]

The focus on street level participants in drug crimes and the discriminatory treatment of the inner-city preference for crack cocaine are followed up by racist prosecution rates. The majority of crack cocaine users in the U.S. are not black, but are either white or Hispanic. Nonetheless, 80 percent of crack cocaine prosecutions are against blacks. No wonder then that at the end of 2003, almost one in ten black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison. [xviii] As of 2004, the American prison population exceeded 2 million people, giving the United States an incarceration rate three times what it was at the end of the 1970s. Today, the U.S. has, according to Professor Cashin, an incarceration rate that “is by far the highest of any industrialized Western nation.” Cashin explains, “The prison population increased tenfold between 1972 and 2002, with two-thirds of that increase consisting of racial minorities.” [xix]

According to Cashin, from 1985 to 2000, state spending on prisons grew six times faster than did state spending on higher education. “In 1980, black men enrolled in institutions of higher learning out-numbered black men behind bars by three to one,” but by 2003, there were more black men behind bars than in college. [xx] “Almost one in three young black males is incarcerated or under some other form of supervision by the criminal justice system. One out of three black males born in 2001 will be imprisoned at some point in their lifetime if current trends continue, compared to about one out of eight in 1974.” [xxi]

Our Culpability and Our Responsibility

Whether our racism is psychologically manifest as overt and irrational hatred or whether it is manifest in a willful blindness and a lack of commitment to human equality makes no difference at all. What matters is the extent of the crime we are committing against our own humanity. We cannot escape our culpability by lamenting the intractability of the problem, the complexity of the system, or the lack of resources and political will. This system did not just come into being. We created it with our laws, our government, and our policies. We have a moral and legal obligation to protect the right of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of all human beings in our nation. We have abandoned that obligation, preferring to look the other way, to distance ourselves, and to let the government institutionalize our racism whenever it suits are own shortsighted self-interest.

When we take human beings at a precious young age and subject them to a life without opportunity, without liberty, and without equality, but instead inflict on them squalor, disease, addiction, and violence, we torture their psychology beyond endurance. The harm to their humanity and to our own humanity this system causes cannot be understated.

We live a century and a half after the end of slavery. The racism of that day is not a standard against which we can measure ourselves in the modern context of America today. We don’t need that standard because the institutional racism of the segregated school to prison system we have created and forced upon black Americans is clearly of such staggering dimensions that its cost to our future is incalculably grave. Like global warming, we are carrying with us a crisis that grows harder to address the longer we avoid honestly devoting ourselves to an honorable and just change of course.

The 20th century saw the evolution of numerous new versions of old crimes against humanity: death camps, gulags, ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking, the mafia. One more crime against humanity that we need to broadcast as loud as we can to the public awareness is the institutionalized racist school to prison track America uses against its African Americans. We have a lot on our plate this presidential election with war, corruption, economic recession, and environmental crisis. Jena is here to remind us there is yet one more crisis we cannot afford to any longer neglect. Demand that our school-to-prison track racism be discussed. Make changing it part of your politics. If we don’t begin here with our longest enduring crime against our own humanity, we will never know the meaning of integrity, which is what we must learn in order to address all our other crises.

[i] Gary Younge, “‘Jena is America,’” The Nation, September 22, 2007.

[ii] Annie Decker, Finding the value in public education, The San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 2003, at M-3, reviewing Jennifer L. Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools (Oxford University 2003).

[iii] Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration, How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs 2004) p. xvii.

[iv] “Noted,” The Week, October 5, 2007, p. 22, citing the National Center for Educational Statistics.

[v] Madeleine Baran, “MLK Day Report Shows Greater Disparity Between Black and White, The New Standard, Jan. 19, 2004, http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=116.

[vi] Jesse Jackson, “A Job For the U.s.: Make Economy Fair,” The Chicago Sun Times, March 20, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0320-30.htm.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Tom Nardi, “Lecture highlights racial inequality in America,” The Villanovan, March 29, 2007, http://media.www.villanovan.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticlePrinter Friendly&…

[ix] Madeleine Baran, “MLK Day Report Shows Greater Disparity Between Black and White, The New Standard, Jan. 19, 2004, http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=116.

[x] Griff Witte and Nell Henderson, “Wealth Gap Widens for Blacks, Hispanics,” Washington Post, October 18, 2004, Page A11.

[xi] Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration, How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs 2004) p. 246.

[xii] Ibid. at 92.

[xiii] Marc Mauer and Kara Gotsch, “Seeking Justice in the Drug War,” TomPaine.com, March 12, 2007, http://www.tompaine.com/print/seeking_justice_in_the_drug_war.php.

[xiv] Gary Younge, “‘Jena is America,’” The Nation, September 22, 2007.

[xv] Marc Mauer and Kara Gotsch, “Seeking Justice in the Drug War,” TomPaine.com, March 12, 2007, http://www.tompaine.com/print/seeking_justice_in_the_drug_war.php.

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Jesse Jackson, “A Job For the U.s.: Make Economy Fair,” The Chicago Sun Times, March 20, 2007, http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0320-30.htm.

[xix] Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration, How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: Public Affairs 2004) p. 249.

[xx] Ibid. at 229-230

[xxi] Ibid. at 247.