Yesterday’s march on the Justice Department in Washington sparked a brief article in the Washington Post. The New York Times published a two-paragraph summary of the AP article, but didn’t ask anyone to cover the event. The LA Times did a piece, but signalled their discomfort with the subject matter by featuring a dismissive comment from a local Southern Christian Leadership Conference official.
Reporters who covered the story weren’t sure what the march signified. Some characterized it as an extension of the September event in Jena; some believed it was motivated by the recent spate of noose hangings; while others focused on a range of recent horror stories from Sean Bell to Megan Williams.
The Department of Justice clearly needs a wake-up call, and it appears that the Rev. Al Sharpton is the only black opinion leader in America sufficiently motivated to lead the parade. That is to Sharpton’s credit. At least the man takes action. But it is also a problem.
Sharpton has had a banner year–no question–but he isn’t playing well with black intellectuals. Ta-Nehsi Coates questions Sharpton’s credentials as the representative African American.
“When he becomes the face of often legitimate racial injustices, his critics are then free to snort, ‘Yeah, but it’s Al Sharpton.’ Sure, that’s unfair to the cause. But the reverend is no victim. Mr. Sharpton needs the media to keep up the illusion of his relevance. The pact is simple: He gets a platform, and the media get great television. Memo to everyone everywhere: Al Sharpton isn’t a black leader; he just plays one on TV.”
My concern with the famous reverend is strictly practical: he majors in the minor. I don’t mean to minimize the significance of nooses being strung up across America (I am horrified by the trend); but nooses are a symptom of the real disease.
America’s deepest problem is mass incarceration, a subject Al Sharpton rarely mentions. Take Jena, for example. Sharpton is so insistant that the noose hangers be prosecuted as adults in federal court, he appears to have forgotten about the fate of the Jena 6. Perhaps the argument is that if the feds won’t crack down on the noose boys they need to stop DA Reed Walters from being so hard on Mychal Bell. I don’t think that argument will play to well in a court of law.
Al Sharpton wants all noose hangers prosecuted. Unfortunately, the boys who hung nooses in Jena appear to be the only hate criminals in the nation willing to step up and admit their misdeeds. You can’t prosecute a noose; you need a perp, and we rarely have one.
Jena demonstrates how easily the children of America are swept into prison. That is why my primary goal from the beginning has been to get these kids good attorneys so the cases can be removed from the hands of LaSalle Parish jurors and public officials.
The message must not be, “Let’s lock up the white kids too.”
“With a stroke of my pen I can make your lives disappear,” Walters told the young people of Jena. And across America, young people are disappearing into the Gulag. Once in the system, they rarely get out.
True, some people belong in prison–there is no practical alternative. But America’s prison population has exploded in the course of the last quarter century and poor people of color are paying the price. The folks who rode the buses to Jena understand that. Does Rev. Sharpton?
Friends of Justice 
Thinking out loud here:
Interesting that at the moment we might see a black man become president that we have an absolute vacuum of effective black leaders. This something that needs to be discussed to be understood, I think. Could Obama get into the White House by discussing justice in Jena? Probably not. But should he risk it all and tackle Jena regardless? Emotionally, the answer is yes. Strategically, I think the answer is no. Obama should play his game and win. But there should be a healthy second rung, if not a third rung, of Black leaders that CAN tackle these issues and conquer them. The problem with Sharpton is that controversy is his definition of success. He just doesn’t see an issue through. Which is not to his fault, this is just how he plays the game and once upon a time it was effective and it just isn’t anymore. We seem to live in a world where action is measured in decibels, not actual product. Worse yet, one’s “action” is often self-measured with little or no accountability. This, I think, is our folly as a people and as a nation.
Dan:
You certainly get the prize for the most illuminating comment of the week. Thank you.
As you suggest, there is no sense criticizing Sharpton for doing his thing; he’s a one-trick pony, but he does what he does better than anyone else.
I also agree that Obama should remain tight-lipped on Jena. Hillary Clinton issued a solid comment on the subject yesterday–a cautious vote of support for Sharpton’s march. She did the same five years ago when Bob Herbert tackled the Tulia story (our first adventure in advocacy). Hillary wins a few black votes by feeling the pain, but Obama would only lose support of he embraced the Jena 6.
Unfortunately, the victims of mass incarceration are intrinsically unsympathetic. The media’s puerile reaction to the “money-in-the-mouth” MySapce video shows that Middle America is poised to believe the worst about any low-status defendant–and that goes double for black males. Beyonce poses on a bed of gold bullion with bling in her mouth and we call that a commercial. But Beyonce is a celebrity, so she is supposed to be flush. Bryant Purvis and Carwin Jones flash $25 worth of fake jewelry at the BET awards and CNN is asking questions about the Jena 6 account. One false step and these guys lose support.
A successful advocacy strategy must involve black, white and Latino leaders speaking and marching in unison. The Black Power movement, though beneficial to a lot of people, is too self-referential to impact public policy. White people find it intimidating and recoil. Before we can get a multi-racial coalition behind a criminal justice reform agenda, we need to get folks talking honestly across racial lines. Hopefully, this is happening somewhere; but I don’t see it in the circles I move in.
I certainly do not agree with everything Rev. Al Sharpton says or does, but he loves the media and the media loves him. We were all spinning our wheels trying to get the mainstream media to focus on the Jena Six situation in July, but until Rev. Sharpton heard about it and visited Jena in August and the media followed…no one seemed to notice our cries. After Sharpton’s visit, the mainstream media ascended like ticks on a dog! And the rest, is history.
In CNN’s coverage of the march on the Justice Department yesterday, one of the reporters said there were so many more people there than what was expected…and that even Rev. Sharpton didn’t expect that many. That was wonderful! Does anyone have an approximate count on how many people were there?
I believe the official count is approximately 5,000. A pretty good turnout all things considered.
Dan there is nothing left to be said. Well stated.
While on the one hand this is not the venue to be raising this issue, but on the other hand it needs to be addressed by the so-called “friends of justice”, to wit:
Court strikes down state’s ‘hate crimes’
‘No matter how salutary a bill, it still must be constitutional’
Posted: November 17, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
A court has struck down Pennsylvania’s version of a “hate crimes” law, ruling that what officials there call an “Ethnic Intimidation Law” restriction was “unconstitutional and therefore null and void.”
“Praise the Lord,” said Michael Marcavage, chief of Repent America, a Christian organization. He was one of nearly a dozen people, who became known as the Philadelphia 11, arrested under the law and charged while ministering in 2004 at a publicly funded homosexual event called “OutFest.”
Although the Christians who had been giving their testimony on public property later had their charges dismissed, they had been threatened with up to five decades in jail.
They then challenged the law itself, suing over its adoption, and the 4-1 decision in the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court said the amendments enacted in 2002 were unconstitutional.
“This is a victory for constitutional government, so let us be thankful,” Marcavage said.
The petitioners said the passage of the bill, which originally criminalized agricultural crop destruction but was altered to become the first proposal in Pennsylvania to recognize “sexual orientation” as a protected class, failed to follow Article III of the state constitution. That provision prohibits the complete overhaul of a bill in the course of its passage.
The provisions adopted under the failed procedure increased penalties for crimes based on what the criminal was thinking, specifying the additional penalties for “actual or perceived … ancestry, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.”
“The legislative process that led to the enactment of these amendments clearly violated Article III of the Pennsylvania Constitution,” said Aaron Martin, attorney for Repent America. “The court rightly found that there was no logical or legal connection between trampling down a hay field and assaulting someone on the basis of sexual orientation.”
The opinion was written by Judge James Gardner Collins, who was joined by Judges Doris Smith-Ribner, Dan Pellegrini and Robert Simpson. Judge Bonnie Ledbetter dissented.
The bill had been signed into law by ex-Gov. Mark Schweiker.
Repent America said the case was pursued because members plan to share their testimonies at future public events, and they were concerned charges would be brought – again.
A spokeswoman for a homosexual advocacy group, Stacey Sobel of Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, said the plan was “needed.”
There was no immediate announcement from Gov. Ed Rendell whether the decision would be appealed.
“It’s … important to note that this legal challenge [to protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity] was mounted by individuals who themselves may benefit from the law’s protections for religious minorities,” Rendell told the Associated Press.
“It is well established that a legislative enactment enjoys a strong presumption of constitutionality and it will not be declared invalid unless it clearly, palpably, and plainly violates the constitution,” the court said.
In this case, “We agree with petitioners that [the law] did not retain its original purpose as it moved through the enactment process. … The original version and final version of HB 1493 regulate vastly different activities.”
“We cannot conclude that the amendments retained the original purpose of HB 1493,” the ruling said.
Source:http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58744
But America’s prison population has exploded in the course of the last quarter century and poor people of color are paying the price.
The simple answer is that if these “poor people of color” would simply behave themselves, they would not be in prison. Period. End of Discussion.
Do you think poor people of color are four times as naughty as they were in 1980? No, we are dealing with a deliberate shift in public policy–behavior, black and white, has been constant.
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