The major racial and ethnic communities in American life don’t talk much.  The dialogue vacuum makes it easy to assume that a generic or default American sensibility exists.  You notice the great gulf fixed between black and white America when a morally ambiguous story like Jena emerges.  Its a Rorschach test–you see what you want to see.  And white people and black people don’t see the same thing.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery’s benediction at President Obama’s inaugural ceremony offers another example of this phenomenon.

White people are outraged.  Garments are being rent in twain.  Lowery is being denounced as a racist and a race baiter.

Here’s the offending statement:

“… help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

White people take pride in the fact that America has elected a black president.  Doesn’t this suggest that we have quit our lowdown ways?  Aren’t we already embracing the right?  Isn’t there some kind of statute of limitations on black outrage?

The Rev. Gerald Britt helps place the issue in historical context.  As is often the case, the comments section is almost as enlightening as Rev. Britt’s post.

On the 29th of September, presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama stood before the student body of Howard University in Washington DC.  Four days earlier, I had occupied the same stage as part of a panel including several Jena 6 parents and a few other criminal justice reform advocates.  I have long been aware that then-candidate Obama talked about Jena when he was at Howard; but until today I hadn’t seen a full transcript of his remarks.

I have placed our president’s comments about Jena and criminal justice reform in bold italics below, and you might want to scroll down to that bit before reading the balance of his address.

This speech shows genuine courage.  As Obama himself acknowledges, candor on the subject of crime and justice can be bad for your political health.  The subject is so politically toxic, in fact, that candidate Obama rarely addressed the subject during the campaign and is unlikely to make it front-and-center as president.  Yet I believe these strong declarative come from the heart and reflect our new president’s genuine values and intentions. (more…)

Over at “Grits for Breakfast” Scott Henson has a thoughtful post on the relationship between crime and mental illness.  I’ll give you the opening paragraph as a teaser:

The US Supreme Court has said executing the mentally retarded is unconstitutional, but the mentally ill are still fair game. Dr. Lucy Puryear, a clinical psychiatrist from the Baylor College of Medicine offers a thoughtful discussion at Women in Crime Ink regarding the astonishing case of Andre Thomas, a schizophrenic death row inmate who plucked out his only good eye and ate it (he’d pulled the first one out while sitting in jail awaiting his capital murder trial), adding a whole new dimension to the biblical adage, “an eye for an eye.”

Once again the United States of America has managed a peaceful transfer of power without the shedding of a single drop of blood. 

George Washington feared it could never happen.  But it can, and it does.

When Barack Obama stepped to the microphone he wasn’t smiling.  Neither was the sea of humanity arrayed before him.  As he spoke, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was in free fall on more bad news from the banking industry and the nation was bogged down in two unwinnable wars.  What could a new president say that hadn’t been said before?

With the dexterity of a skilled seamstress, Obama wove the themes of responsibility and inclusion into a single strand.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

American immaturity, the president seemed to suggest, was rooted in an ancient tendency of distinguishing between “us,” (the “real Americans”) and “them,” (the folks who don’t qualify for full citizenship). 

The us-them distinction expounded formally in the dreadful DredScott decision.  For the purposes of political calculus, evern African American resident of the United States was equal to three-fifths of a person.  In the wake of the civil rights movement the full citizenship of non-whites was recognized, but there has always been an unspoken assumption that, while all are equal, some (to quote George Orwell) are more equal than others.

Instead of arguing for the full inclusion of non-white Americans, President Obama introduced an alternative assumption: all the folks who have crowded the American stage from the earliest days of our history have been full-fledged American making equally important contributions to our greatness as a nation. (more…)

This CNN report provides important background to Mychal Bell’s recent troubles including a brief interview in which Mychal discusses his dance with disaster.

Things were just as bad at the civil rights division of the Department of Justice as many of us feared.  According to a recent article in the Washington Post, “a former Justice Department official entrusted with enforcing civil rights laws refused to hire lawyers whom he labeled as “commies” and transferred another attorney for allegedly writing in “ebonics” and benefiting from “an affirmative action thing,” according to an investigation released yesterday by internal watchdogs.”

According to a report from the department’s inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility, Bradley J. Schlozman, injected partisan politics into the hiring process.  “Over three years in which he controlled employment decisions, Schlozman favored young conservatives for entry-level jobs, transferred those he called “right-thinking Americans” into top assignments and instructed colleagues that “adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply,” according to e-mails cited in the report. Authorities analyzed 112 career hires during Schlozman’s tenure and determined that “virtually all” of the lawyers whose political affiliations were known at the time had ties to Republicans or conservative legal groups.”

Schlozman has been accused of lying under oath in his testimony to Congress.  According to the Boston Globe, Eric Holder, the Attorney General designate, has promised to investigate Schlozman if he is confirmed.

This is just one instance in which the fox was been invited to guard the Department Of Justice hen house during the Bush Administration.  The DOJ is supposed to represent the interests of all Americans, not just those of a favored minority.  When hiring policy at the Civil Rights Division is being set by a guy who doesn’t believe in civil rights we’ve got a problem.

While the Obama administration shows little appetite for a thoroughgoing investigation of Bush administration abuses, Paul Krugman at the NYT wants the offenders held accountable.   After cataloguing the manifold sins of ommission and comission (including hiring practices at the DOJ) Krugman has some strong advice for the 44th President:

While it’s probably in his short-term political interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when it’s convenient.

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

I listened to this thoughful NPR opinion piece this morning as I lifted weights in my garage.  I was impressed. 

William Lawrence teaches American Church History (my own specialty) at Perkins School of Theology, a Methodist seminary affiliated with Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

Presidents have preacher problems, Lawrence says, because most Americans don’t know very much about religion–their own or anybody else’s.  That’s why so many Southern Baptists feared the election of a Roman Catholic named John Kennedy and why non-evangelicals broke into a sweat when a born-again Baptist named Jimmy Carter took the oath of office.  The text of Dr. Lawrence’s remarks is printed on the KERA website. (more…)

News and Notes is an NPR program that highlights stories of particular interest to African American listeners.  Host Farai Chideya took an interest in the Jena 6 story early on and her program has contacted me about it in the past.  The lion’s share of this roundtable discussion deals with Mychal Bell’s attempted suicide (none of the panelists considered the shooting accidental).   

I clicked on the “listen now” tab with a sense of foreboding.  I was afraid participants would conclude that the black community should never have supported the Jena 6. 

That’s not what I heard.  Jasmyne Cannick, Shaun King (of Shaun in the City), and Eric Brown of the Detroit News talk about the impact of intense media coverage on small-town kids like Mychal Bell.  The general sense is that supporters of the Jena 6 turned Mychal into a hero–a burden of expectation he couldn’t handle. 

When we stand behind people like Mychal Bell, Robert Bailey and the other Jena defendants we must understand who they are and who they aren’t.  They aren’t heroes.  They are neither wise nor well-informed.  For the most part, they come from broken families and have learned to live with severe financial hardship.  In their world, role models are in short supply and, for better and for worse, the Hip Hop culture fills the moral void.

Justice advocates need to grow beyond what I call the thug-hero syndrome.  The Jena 6 were vulnerable to over-prosecution because the white community in Jena had labelled them as lower ninth ward thugs.  I tried to present the Jena 6, Justin Barker (the student assaulted at Jena High School) and the young white boys who hung nooses from a tree on the white side of the school courtyard as victims of a toxic social environment.  These kids had been fighting sporadically for months when a fire at the high school sparked a crisis atmosphere. (more…)

At the request of Bill Mefford, Director of Civil and Human Rights with the United Methodist Church, I have added my signature to this forceful call for a more compassionate and common sense criminal justice policy.  If you are a religious leader and would like to add your endorsement, Rev. Mefford can be contacted at:

Bill Mefford
Director, Civil and Human Rights
General Board of Church and Society
The United Methodist Church
100 Maryland Avenue NE
Washington DC 20002
(202) 488-5657
bmefford@UMC-GBCS.ORG

Criminal Justice Reform Faith Letter

The undersigned faith organizations are committed to reforming the criminal justice system in the United States. We represent millions of Americans, many of whom provide pastoral care for prisoners while they are incarcerated, direct services for those reentering society after incarceration, and sponsor various drug and crime prevention services and programs for our constituencies and the community at large. Thus, our organizations have a vested interest in the state of the criminal justice system and are mobilized to advocate and work for common sense reforms.With a new Administration and Congress we hope that the needed reforms in the criminal justice system will be implemented in a bipartisan fashion. The past approach by Congress to “get tough on crime” has given rise to policies which led to a ballooning of the prison population and has often averted our focus from effective solutions for our communities. These policies forced the states to place their most intense focus on building prisons, which subsequently diverted their attention away from effective solutions that result in safer communities. This explains why we have a 68% national recidivism rate.

Our purpose is to work with Congress to pass criminal justice reforms that refocus our energy and efforts on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation programs, increase public safety, strengthen families, and reduce the enormous social and economic costs of maintaining such a large prison population.

Current get-tough approaches have not enhanced public safety, but instead, have exacerbated problems for communities. The number of those imprisoned exceeds two million, one in every hundred adults. And 1.7 million children have a parent in prison. Moreover, racial injustice has been intensified, as one in every eight Black males in their twenties is currently incarcerated. Prison conditions have become harsher with less and less resources to manage the bulging system. The lack of education and rehabilitation breeds antagonism which negatively affects the incarcerated and the prison staff as well. Studies indicate that prison guards suffer from a much higher rate of suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness as well as domestic violence. We believe that reforms are needed not just to protect the rights of the imprisoned but to protect corrections staff as well.

With serious effort and necessary leadership and vision, this situation can be effectively addressed. Reform based on a holistic approach will protect the human rights and basic dignity of the imprisoned, maintain the mental health of corrections staff, and increase public safety for all of society. The faith organizations endorsing this letter believe there are common values that can effectively bring about these necessary reforms. These values include:

• A greater emphasis on prevention as a way to reduce drug abuse and crime and thereby establish safer communities;
• Healing for the victims of crime and personal responsibility and accountability for those responsible for committing acts of crime;
• Education and meaningful work as a basis for morale and as preparation for those who are incarcerated to become self-sufficient, contributing members of their communities when they are released;
• Compassion for all people coming out of prison who should be given a second chance so that their families and communities will be strengthened;
• Equality for racial minorities that have been unfairly targeted through racial profiling and sentencing disparities;
• Respect for the integrity, safety, and rights of the imprisoned.

The reforms we call for will require sustained effort and leadership, and we look forward to working with you to make them a reality.