I was listening to legal scholar Michelle Alexander on Fresh Air to day and thinking about Martin Luther King, about my friend Julio Medina and his experience in Sing Sing, and about all that we have talked about here on GMP with regard to race.
I thought about my friend Steve Locke’s post about why he doesn’t want to talk about race anymore.
I thought about my own response to charges of racism.
I thought about my dad in 1964.
And I wondered how far we have really come?
Under Jim Crow laws, black Americans were relegated to a subordinate status for decades. Things like literacy tests for voters and laws designed to prevent blacks from serving on juries were commonplace in nearly a dozen Southern states.
In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs. She says that although Jim Crow laws are now off the books, millions of blacks arrested for minor crimes remain marginalized and disfranchised, trapped by a criminal justice system that has forever branded them as felons and denied them basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.
photo from The New Jim Crow
About Tom Matlack
Tom – you are an interesting guy! Passion meets Mad Man. If you weren’t passionate you wouldn’t keep doing what other people think of as mad – Start GMP – go and sit with prisoners and let them tell their stories…..
I had heard and read about Julio long before I came near GMP. I found his story Inspiring and amazing. I have seen so many people buckle under the weight of being wise. Julio is a Dude who did not.
Wisdom is seen as hard and difficult, it’s for old men with long beards and esoteric ways of speaking that’s cryptic. That’s not wisdom – it’s a Hackneyed Stereotype.
I say being wise is doing the right thing in the moment, no matter how hard – so for me Julio is one hell of a wise man.
One of my personal heroes was a little known Patent Clerk from Vienna. He had a mind that was not afraid to see and do the right thing in the moment. It did not matter what others said or thought, he just was wise and courageous – and he went against the grain. He said some interesting things too:
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
That’s just what Julio did and used wisdom and courage in the moment to start shifting the world in a different direction. Genius and Courage.
I’d love Julio to meet my hero – but Unfortunately “Albert Einstein” died in 1955 before both Julia and you were born.
I’m glad that there are some mad men about – With a Touch of Genius and a lot of Courage. Einstein, that little known Patent Clerk changed not just how we look at the world but opened up so much more on a Universal Scale.
I’m glad to see that there are men about who rank with Albert!
Both You and Julio are so much like him.P^)
yeah MH I kind of get off on being a mad man if you hadn’t figured that out by now.
Julio is one of the truly most inspirational people I have ever met in my life.
Well my dear Mad Man – just remember what Albert said:
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Don’t it make you Mad? P^)
I think that Michelle Alexander is saying blacks commit a disproprotionate number of crimes. Which is true. That implies something, but she’s trying to reduce the implications by acting as if drug crimes are in place to oppress blacks, or that enforcement is racially biased. IIRC, the powder/crack issue was pushed by black leaders who saw the latter ruining black neighborhoods. The former wasn’t ruining white neighborhoods.
It is also true that crimes not directly connected with drugs have a disproportionately black face, both as perp and as victim. This includes rape, murder, robbery, assault. Most places, we lament the plight of the victims. When the racial issue is in play, the victims get no attention.
“When the racial issue is in play, the victims get no attention.”
And when the victim is from a racial minority they get no attention as well – so that’s Double Prejudice!
Two pieces of data make it difficult for me to believe that “Jim Crow” still exists.
First, since the 1990s, there has been an observed disparity in socioeconomic success between blacks born in the US, and those who immigrated from the Caribbean and West Africa (in particular, former British Caribbean possessions, there Spanish and French counterparts do less well). The children of immigrants then usually build on the success of their parents, leading to further advantages over blacks whose parents were born in the US (this was observed by Kalmijn in 1996).
Second, research on school choice (looking at the effect of public schools on student achievement) during the 2000s found that often parental involvement is more important than which school a child ultimately attends. Looking at Chicago, which uses a lottery (basically pure chance) to determine which school a child ends up at, Cullen, Jacob, and Levitt found that the best predictor of a child’s success was whether or not their parents wanted them to go to a better school; the actual school they ended up in wasn’t as important.
When faced with findings like these, it is difficult to believe that the perils facing the black community are completely generated from the outside. Someone who is visibly black, but from West African or the British Caribbean, will face the exact same prejudices on the part of the American police and business communities: yet the immigrant groups (and their children) outperform their domestic counterparts, despite still being “black.” Similarly, parents from poor neighborhoods who are focused on the success of their children will generally see their children succeed, even if they are placed in worse schools located in poor neighborhoods. If being black and/or poor was the deciding factor in anyone’s life, we wouldn’t see these outcomes, instead we would see the opposite: no subset of blacks would be successful, and all children would reflect only the schools they attended.
Mediahound
That’s what I meant, but I wasn’t clear. Thanks for fixing it up.
Everybody’s heard of James Byrd but not Kenneth Tillery, Matthew Shepard but not Jesse Dirkhising. Nobody’s heard of the poor kid at the center of the Duke/Lombard case. “course it’s a matter of age and privacy, so what I should say is nobody’s heard of the Duke/Lombard case at all.
Knoxville Horror? Fuggedaboutit.
It’s a matter of lining up the victim and the perp and see whose Accredited Victim Status has more mojo.