April 2021

“Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don’t characterize those whites as inner city families.) Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit.” ― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America Our government created policies that were designed and implemented with the specific intent to benefit white people and harm black people. Bruce Western tells us that poverty is violence. Bryan Stevenson informs us that the opposite of poverty is justice. Our government condemned black people to live in violent places that are free from justice. These ghettos are over-policed. In some cities, perhaps, even Tucson, they are… Read More »Some Examples Of Race Based Housing Discrimination

The Derek Chauvin trial, and the jury selected to hear the case, got me thinking about voting rights and the right to serve on a jury. The Chauvin jury is one of the most racially integrated juries in the history of Minnesota. It is because of this fact, that I started to let my mind believe that maybe the killers of George Floyd will be held to account. Even if Derek is acquitted I will at least have faith in the acquittal, because of who served on the jury. We have seen a torrent of voter suppression bills introduced in various state legislatures across the country. Yet, no one is talking about the connection between voter suppression and the ability to serve on a jury.  Some of the grave injustices in this country were committed because defendants could not get a jury of their peers. Further, many people escaped justice due to the exclusion of everyone except white men on juries. Remember the trial of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant? An all white and all male jury refused to hold them accountable for the lynching of Emmett Till. Blacks and women were not allowed to serve on juries during that period of time, because the right to vote had not been fully protected by law. This jury, despite the overwhelming evidence of their guilt, failed to convict these two after 67 minutes of deliberations. In fact, picking a foreman and getting the jury instructions back to the room probably took… Read More »Attacks On Voting Rights Are Attacks On The Right To Have A Fair And Impartial Jury.

Adkins v. Virginia the SCOTUS held that it was unconstitutional to execute someone with an intellectual disability.Many people are against the death penalty. As we learned from our discussion of A Just Mercy, the death penalty is a sanitized lynching. With the Adkins decision, we started to get some safeguards to rollback the number of executions in our country. Yet, I need to repeat this one more time: the death penalty is a state-sponsored lynching.I need you to center what I just said about the death penalty. Adkins was now the law of the land. However, this is America. Accordingly, white prosecutors embarked on a righteous crusade to prove to the world that IQ tests are racist. In fact, these white prosecutors would argue to the court that IQ test are so racially biased that the Judge must add between five and fifteen points to each black person’s IQ score.These white prosecutors were successful. In many states, judges now add between 5 and 15 points to the IQ test score of black people, so we can “justly” execute them. Let me repeat this: white prosecutors have spent millions of dollars to establish the racial bias of IQ tests, only so they can kill black people. They have not spent a dime to advocate that points need to be added to black LSAT, MCAT, GRE, SAT, ACT, etc. scores. These points only need to be added to IQ scores, so they can be raised to a level where we can execute these black… Read More »4 United States Supreme Court Cases