Reading
The
reading this morning comes from The New
Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. She
writes,
The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than 30 years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than two million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.
The racial dimension of mass incarceration is its most striking feature. No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.
These stark racial disparities cannot be explained by rates of drug crime. Studies show that people of all colors use and sell drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color. This is not what one would guess, however, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society. [p. 6-7]
Sermon
I
want you to create a mental image of a drug dealer. Take a moment and hold that image while I
tell you a true story.
At
the beginning of my ministry here, one of the things I did for fun was to
volunteer for an oral history project. I
was trained in the techniques of oral history and I was assigned to interview a
gentleman who lived in a rural area outside of one of Kansas’ university towns. I drove out to his home on a Saturday morning
and he invited me to sit on his backyard patio.
“Can I offer you something,” he asked me. “Coffee, tea, water, soft drink, a joint?” I graciously accepted the cup of coffee. It was at that point that it dawned on me
that this man had a small marijuana growing operation in his wooded backyard.
There’s
not really anything more to this story.
But, be honest with me. How many
of you were holding a mental image of a white guy in his sixties with a Ph.D.
and who also happens to be a respected member of the community? Be honest.
This
morning’s sermon is inspired by a book I read earlier this year, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. It was a New York Times bestseller and has
been called the most important book about racial justice in the past
decade. Alexander is a law professor at the
Ohio State University with a dual appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the
Study of Race and Ethnicity. She will
also be a guest speaker at our denomination’s General Assembly a little more
than a week from now and I look forward to having the chance to hear her and
hopefully to meet her.
In
the month of April, at least three different Unitarian Universalist ministers
preached sermons on Alexander’s book.
All three sermons – one in Iowa, one in Illinois, and one in Oklahoma – were
delivered, interestingly enough, by white guys about my age. All three sermons beautifully summarized the arguments
of Alexander’s book. I am going to take
a slightly different course and speak about the connection between the
subject matter of Alexander’s book and the day-to-day lives of members of
Unitarian Universalist congregations. Before
we talk about the lived experience of African Americans who are victimized by
the war on drugs, let me first say a few words about my own experience and
about my own privilege. You might ask
yourself if your experience, or the experience of members of your family, has
parallels with my own. I grew up in a
town where there was certainly some level of illegal drug use, although I
didn’t encounter drugs until I went to college. I went to a liberal arts college with a
reputation for its open and laissez-affair attitude towards drug use. Even though I wasn’t one to seek out drugs, I
learned what was common knowledge among most students – the smart kid in my
Humanities seminar was doing a brisk business selling hallucinogens from his
dorm room, ecstasy was being dealt out of that dorm, those students were rumored
to be doing more than just their homework in the chemistry lab.
The
cost of all of this could be measured in wasted brain cells, measured in wasted
tuition dollars, or, sadly, measured in lives damaged by drug abuse and
addiction. The cost for my college peers,
however, was never measured in jail time, legal fees, prosecution, or the long
term consequences of a criminal record.
To
go back to the story about the university professor, it should not be at all
surprising that this would be where I would encounter drugs. Michelle Alexander writes, “Studies
consistently indicate that drug markets, like American society generally,
reflect our nation’s racial and socioeconomic boundaries. Whites tend to sell to whites; blacks to
blacks. University students tend to sell
to each other. Rural whites, for their
part, don’t make a special trip to the ‘hood to purchase marijuana.” [p.
99-100] We know that many areas of
American life remain segregated; drug dealing is one of those areas.
I
think it is absolutely essential to name privilege at the outset, before we
launch into a discussion about the New
Jim Crow and the war on drugs. I
want you to imagine a world in which police show up to do locker searches at
Shawnee Mission East High School. I want
you to imagine a world in which police descend on the Town Center Plaza on a
Saturday night and stop and frisk those going to the movie theater, in the way
that young people of color are stopped and frisked in New York City and
elsewhere. I want you to imagine a world
in which the police set up a traffic stop along 151st Street and search cars for drugs. And, I want you to imagine a world in which
those caught up in these police operations were arrested and prosecuted to the
fullest extent of the law.
Such
a world for us would be unthinkable and we would find it
intolerable. Any police chief or
prosecutor who tried such a thing around here would soon be looking for a new
job. As Michelle Alexander writes, “In
every state across our nation, African Americans – particularly in the poorest
neighborhoods – are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in
public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods.”
[p. 98]
Michelle
Alexander combines passion with devastating evidence to argue that the war on
drugs and the modern day criminal justice system creates a system of racialized
social control that is analogous to the old Jim Crow system. Alexander begins with a provocative history
of one African American family. She
writes,
Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises – the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. [p.1]
Alexander
describes a system of racialized social control that does not only affect the 2.3
million incarcerated persons in our nation’s prisons, but also the millions of
Americans who find after serving their time that they are perpetually
punished. She writes,
The “whites” only sign may be gone, but new signs have gone up – notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses – informing the general public that “felons” are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind – discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service. Those labeled criminals can even be denied the right to vote. [p. 141]
It
is an historical fact that “get tough on crime” politics found its ascendancy at
the precise moment in our nation’s history when the old Jim Crow system met its
defeat at the hands of the civil rights movement. Politicians could no longer explicitly call
for racial segregation, but they did develop a coded way of speaking about
crime and poverty. The crime rate was actually
in decline when Ronald Reagan officially announced the war on drugs in the
early 1980s. Since that time,
Republicans and Democrats alike have both made it a political point to show
that they are tough on crime, even though the policies they support often have
a detrimental effect on the communities they claim to be making safe.
Some
have balked at the idea that the legal disenfranchisement of criminals today is
analogous to the legal disenfranchisement of people of color during the era of
Jim Crow. If you can’t do the time,
don’t do the crime, they might say. So,
let me be clear. This sermon is not
about the legalization of drugs, although I have some very definite opinions on
the matter. Nor is this sermon about the
ethics and morality of drug use, although I do have some particular opinions on
this matter as well. No, this sermon is
about justice.
If
whites make up about two-thirds of the adult population in the United States,
and if study after study shows that whites are more likely to use and sell
drugs than people of color, then a just enforcement of our nation’s laws would
mean that roughly three out of four people in prison for drug crimes should be
white. Nationwide, an African American
man is thirteen times more likely to go to prison for a drug offense than a
white man. According to Human RightsWatch, in not one single state in the nation are whites incarcerated for drug
crimes at a rate that matches their percentage of the population at large. In fact, “in seven states African Americans
constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.” [p. 98] If Jake, Dylan, and Amy went to prison at the
same rates as Jamal, Darnell, and Aisha, we would consider it outrageous and
intolerable. The system would be changed
and the legal consequences of drug use would be altered. To say that the law is the law is to use
rhetoric that is hollow. Americans would
not accept these laws if the laws were enforced fairly.
***
While
I was reading Elizabeth Alexander’s book, I had a vivid memory of an experience
from years earlier. During grad school I
received an invitation from my undergraduate institution. My college’s president was coming to Boston
and there was going to be a reception for alumni living in the Boston area. There was a question and answer session and
someone asked him to comment on steps the college could take to make the
student body more racially diverse. His
answer was brutally honest and quite memorable.
He said that his admissions staff spoke with the parents of students of
color who chose another school. What
they heard back was that the college’s laissez-affair and tolerant approach to
drug use was a major strike against the college in the eyes of minority
families. The narrative that says that
experimenting with recreational drug use in your late teens and early twenties
is a rite of passage to be regarded with a lighthearted spirit, a wink and a
nod, is a narrative of privilege that is out of touch with the lived reality of
many people of color. For them, as they had
instilled into their children, there was no room for error and one
slip was all it took for opportunities to close forever. According to my college president, parents of
prospective students of color told the admissions officers that it felt as
though the college didn’t really understand the world they were coming from.
The
war on drugs, the new Jim Crow, is a system that harms whites as well as people
of color. It is a system that harms
whites in more ways than just serving as an impediment to visions of diversity,
pluralism, and multiculturalism.
Scholars have pointed out the way in which the old Jim Crow system, like
slavery before it, made use of what is called the “racial bribe.” The “racial bribe” gave poor whites a sense
of superiority over blacks and the price of the bribe was to side with the
white wealthy elite. Michelle Alexander
argues that the war on drugs, the mass incarceration of people of color as a
form of racialized control, functions as another form of a racial bribe. She writes, “In retrospect, it seems clear
that nothing could have been more important in the 1970s and 1980s than finding
a way to create a durable, interracial, bottom-up coalition for social and
economic justice to ensure that another caste system did not emerge from the
ashes of Jim Crow.” [p. 256]
What
are we to do? There are so many issues
of importance that tug at us. These
issues are environmental and economic.
They involve ending oppression based on race, gender, nationality, religion,
and sexual orientation. They involve
issues of peace and civil liberties and civil rights, not to mention the day to
day work to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and care for the sick.
I would
urge you to read Michelle Alexander’s book.
Her arguments are powerful and persuasive and may change the way you see
the world and your own story. Share this
book with your friends. Social movements
need a large group of people who do not find the world as it is to be
acceptable. You can become one of those
people, if you are not already.
Through
reading this book and others like it, we also grow in an awareness of our own
privilege, of the ways in which the story of our own life is not
universal. Such growth and
self-understanding is necessary if we are to build the world we dream about and
be the community we dream about. Such
learning is incredibly important if we would be one.
Let
us continue to find a deeper wholeness, a connection between our own story and
the story of our world. Let us connect
soul with earth. May we turn caravans of
despair into journeys of passion, connection, integrity, and insight. With these deep yearnings, let us go forth.
