mass incarceration

Bryan Stevenson on What Well-Meaning White People Need to Know About Race →

…

Your work is informed by a powerful sense that history lives in the present. How does the past bear on our current quest for racial justice?

You can’t understand many of the most destructive issues or policies in our country without understanding our history of racial inequality. And I actually think it begins with our interaction with native people, because we took land, we killed people, we disrupted a culture. We were brutal. And we justified and rationalized that land grab, that genocide, by characterizing native people as different. It was the first way in which this narrative of racial difference was employed to justify behaviors that would otherwise be unjustifiable. When you are allowed to demonize another community and call them savages, and treat them brutally and cruelly, it changes your psyche. We abused and mistreated the communities and cultures that existed on this land before Europeans arrived, and then that narrative of racial difference was used to develop slavery.

In what way? Can you elaborate?

I was in East Africa a few months ago. It was the first time I had been there. And it was startling to be in this land and see all of these black people and the beauty of that land. Despite the economic and political situation, there was something so affirming about a space like that. And then I thought about how painful it was that my people, my tribe, my foreparents were in that group of Africans who were kidnapped. Kidnapping is the worst kind of crime in many respects because it lasts for a really long time. Some people have been kidnapped for days and weeks, and that sense of trauma never goes away. And I thought about what it was like for those people to be kidnapped and then displaced, pulled from their land, and then brutalized and tortured and chained. And that’s before they were made to engage in forced labor.

I genuinely believe that, despite all of that victimization, the worst part of slavery was this narrative that we created about black people—this idea that black people aren’t fully human, that they are three-fifths human, that they are not capable, that they are not evolved. That ideology, which set up white supremacy in America, was the most poisonous and destructive consequence of two centuries of slavery. And I do believe that we never addressed it. I think the North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. The racial-equality principle that is in our Constitution was never extended to formerly enslaved people, and that is why I say slavery didn’t end in 1865. It evolved.

Into what?

Decades of terrorism and lynching and this brutal regime where black people were burned alive and hanged and taunted and disenfranchised and threatened. Most people don’t think about the fact that we had Jim Crow laws. We had racial segregation. Black people wouldn’t have agreed with that. They would not have gone into the decrepit colored bathroom when the white bathroom was better. They wouldn’t drink out of the colored fountain—unless there was the threat of violence. So you cannot disconnect lynching and terror and violence from racial segregation and subordination.

And that history continued during the civil rights era, where the response to non-violence was violence. The response to ministers and activists begging for equality was bombs and billy clubs and dogs and fire hoses. And even there, I think we won the legal battle. But, again, we lost the narrative war. The people holding up those signs that said “Segregation Forever,” “Segregation or War,” were not required to act differently, to think differently. And that is the prelude to mass incarceration. That is why I don’t think you can understand the tremendous increase in the incarceration rates, the targeting of black people and menacing of communities of color and poor communities without understanding this history. We have to understand enslavement in a new way. I don’t think we’ve done a good job of educating people about what slavery did.

In your book Just Mercy, you cite a 2003 estimate that one out of three black babies will end up incarcerated, and note that this has everything to do with institutionalized racism, which itself is the product of a great deal of hidden racism in daily life. What does that racism look like?

Well, there is this burden in America that people of color bear. This presumption of dangerousness weighs on you. And when we don’t talk about it, when we don’t name it, the burden only gets heavier. People of color have to navigate around these presumptions, and it is exhausting.

And yet, so hard for so many white people to recognize, much less acknowledge.

But when somebody affirms that it exists, it can be really liberating. It can be really affirming to know that you are not crazy. As I get older, I am beginning to appreciate the weight of a lifetime lived navigating these presumptions. And so I want to affirm for young kids that the world will still do that to them, but they should know that the world is wrong, and that you have to not only endure, but you have to overcome. A lot of people of color applaud when I say this. They do so because they have never had anybody in a public space—in a mixed space—say it. And I think we have to say that, you know. But, yes, I do think that there’s an implicit bias that undermines how we interact with one another, and I do think that, in America, no one is free from the threat created by our history of racial inequality.

Whites included.

Yes. You can be very progressive, you can be very educated, and you can still be complicit in the kind of microaggression that takes place when you look at people through this lens of racial difference. So we all have a lot to learn. I don’t think that we should expect to make progress on these issues without bumping into one another, without making mistakes. We just have to have the humility and the patience and the courage to work through that. What I don’t think we should do is just retreat because we don’t know exactly where all the landmines are.

…

READ MORE