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systemic racism
A Juneteenth Reflection on America’s Unfinished Business
This year, as we celebrate the end of chattel slavery in the United States, we must remember the work that Frederick Douglass called upon us all to do remains unfinished.
Jun 18, 2024
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass in his Fourth of July Oration in 1852. “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty” of America.
Douglass’s speech remains among the most powerful and poignant in United States history more than a century and a half later. With the Civil War nearly a decade away, and the system of chattel slavery still going strong throughout the South and powering the economy throughout the country, Douglass pointed with undeniable clarity at the “venomous creature [that] is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic.”
As we celebrate Juneteenth in 2024, the work that Douglass called upon us all to do remains unfinished. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Reconstruction Amendments formally put an end to the widespread practice of enslavement of Black people in this country. But the work of reconstructing our society and creating the truly equitable and free society promised in our founding documents has a long way to go.
Today we have the job of coming to grips with our history and charting a new path for those who come after us.
That is why on this Juneteenth, we should all ask: What, to us, is Juneteenth? For all of us, and especially for the Black community, it is a day of joyful celebration, marking the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, as it has been for a century and a half. It marks the end of that “venomous creature” in the republic. To be sure, each one of us should celebrate that important day in 1865, as the Black community did so memorably in Texas that year.
But on Juneteenth, we should also remember that while the snake may have been slain, too much of its venom remains in our system. The venom still takes the form of racism, racial inequity, and the enduring power of white supremacy.
What, to each of us today, is Juneteenth? For those of us in the white community of the United States, I see it as a call to action to do our part to continue the work of reconstruction. We can and should imagine a truly equitable, multiracial America—one we have never before encountered but one which remains a real possibility. There is a fierce pushback against this work today, but this is a pushback we must resist as we continue the unfinished work of Reconstruction.
Like many white Americans whose families have been in the United States for a long time, and in fact came to these shores before the nation even existed, my family has both been involved in the business of enslaving others and has fought for the end of slavery. As Douglass pointed out in his soaring Fourth of July oration, ancestors of mine have done terrible things to others in the name of Christianity, in pursuit of money, and out of ignorance and hate. Others have valiantly fought against friends and families to create a better, fairer society.
Today we have the job of coming to grips with our history and charting a new path for those who come after us. That is why white people must join with others in the work of making our communities and institutions more diverse. Those of us who identify as white and male have a particular obligation to reflect on Juneteenth and consider how we can use what we have to be part of overcoming in the name of a brighter, more sustainable future. We have power to wield, and should wield it, in making our economies more equitable and inclusive.
In Chicago, where I live, there is a fact that I cannot shake. I can’t get it out of my head that a baby born in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Englewood is expected to live 30 years less than a baby born on the same day in the predominantly white, and more wealthy, neighborhood of Streeterville downtown. That is a difference of six miles—and 30 years.
The promise of abolition, a healed and equal society, has not yet been realized. And we can only get there by working together with friends, community, and in solidarity.
This disparity of life expectancy is a combination of a multitude of factors of which racial identity is one, but it boils down to this: a Black baby born in one part of our nation’s third largest city is less likely to enjoy as long and healthy a life as a white baby born a few miles away. There is no way to imagine that this marks an equal society. Health disparities such as this one affect Native American communities and Latin communities across America, too.
Alongside health, consider gaps in education, earnings, and wealth between racial groups in the United States, in state after state. These, in the words of Douglass, remain among our “national inconsistencies.” Black Americans consistently enjoy fewer of the fruits of the republic than those of other racial and ethnic groups. To achieve true racial healing in America, to get the venom truly out of our system, requires us to keep at the work of racial equity.
The promise of abolition, a healed and equal society, has not yet been realized. And we can only get there by working together with friends, community, and in solidarity. At the MacArthur Foundation, we put this approach into practice each day as we collectively strive to lead with a commitment to justice. The progress we have made in the past, and any progress in the future, requires collaboration between people from all kinds of backgrounds.
Juneteenth is a call to do better as a nation, to create an America in which every child born today—no matter their race, their ethnicity, their gender, their neighborhood—has an equal chance to thrive. We remain a long way from that reality. No matter our race, we should do our part on the unfinished work of creating a free and equal society.
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UN Report Urges End to Forced US Prison Labor—a 'Contemporary Form of Slavery'
One of the U.N. experts who compiled the report after visiting the U.S. earlier this year said its findings "point to the critical need for comprehensive reform."
Sep 28, 2023
A report published Thursday by United Nations human rights experts condemns systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system and policing, while describing "appalling" prison conditions and decrying forced unpaid convict labor as a "contemporary form of slavery."
The U.N. International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement report follows a visit to the U.S. earlier this year by a team of human rights experts. The U.N. officials collected testimonies from 133 affected people, visited five prisons and jails, and held meetings with advocacy groups and numerous government and police officials in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
"In all the cities we went to, we heard dozens of heartbreaking testimonies on how victims do not get justice or redress. This is not new, and it's unacceptable," Tracie Keesee, an expert member of the mechanism, said in a statement. "This is a systemic issue that calls for a systemic response."
"Law enforcement and criminal justice institutions in the United States share and reproduce values, attitudes, and stereotypes of U.S. society and institutions. These must be reformed."
The experts found that "racism in the U.S.—a legacy of slavery, the slave trade, and 100 years of legalized apartheid that followed slavery's abolition—continues to exist today in the form of racial profiling, police killings, and many other human rights violations."
The report cites instances of prisoners locked away in solitary confinement—widely recognized as a form of psychological torture—for a decade or longer, children sentenced to life in prison, and pregnant inmates chained during childbirth, "who due to the chaining, lost their babies."
"All these practices—including shackling pregnant women before, during, and after labor—are an affront to human dignity and the best interest of the child," the report states. "Instruments of restraint shall never be used on women during labor, during childbirth, and immediately after childbirth, in accordance with the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners," also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules.
The experts were "astonished" that forced unpaid or poorly paid convict labor "exists to this day in the United States, constituting a contemporary form of slavery." The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, "except as punishment for crime," and congressional efforts to close the loophole have been unsuccessful.
The report notes:
The delegation received shocking information over "plantation-style" prisons in Southern states, in which contemporary forms of slavery are reported. Commonly known as "Angola," the Louisiana State Penitentiary occupies an 18,000-acre former slave plantation, larger than the island of Manhattan. The plantation prison soil worked by incarcerated labor today is the same soil worked by slaves before the Civil War. Angola currently houses nearly 5,000 adult men, the majority of them Black men, forced to labor in the fields (even picking cotton) under the watch of white "freemen" on horseback, in conditions very similar to those of 150 years ago. The mechanism received direct testimonies from Angola victims and allegations of children being transferred to this prison, held in solitary confinement, and in general under appalling detention conditions.
Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered Louisiana officials to stop imprisoning children on Angola's former death row by September 15.
Addressing the more than 1,000 people killed annually by U.S. law enforcement officers—only 1% of which result in the killer being criminally charged—the report warns that such killings will continue unless police use of force regulations are aligned with international standards.
"We reject the 'bad apple' theory," There is strong evidence suggesting that the abusive behavior of some individual police officers is part of a broader and menacing pattern," said mechanism expert member Juan Méndez. "Law enforcement and criminal justice institutions in the United States share and reproduce values, attitudes, and stereotypes of U.S. society and institutions. These must be reformed."
To that end, the report contains a lengthy list of over 30 recommendations, including:
- Fully implementing the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights' four-point agenda for transformative change for racial justice and equality;
- Tackling poverty and lack of quality education, employment opportunities, healthcare, adequate housing, and other human rights violations as a way to combat systemic racism;
- Adopting a human rights-based approach to policing and a national strategy—including legislation—to reduce killings by law enforcement;
- Eliminating all racial profiling;
- Creating an effective nationwide record system of individuals under investigation or found criminally or administrative guilty for police misconduct;
- Removing police from schools in favor of alternatives, including counselors, social workers, nurses, and mental health professionals;
- Adopting an immigration system with a human rights-based approach and addressing systemic racism within the ranks of immigration authorities;
- Ending the "War on Drugs" and adopting a human rights-based approach to drug policies, in part by decriminalizing low-level drug offenses;
- Reducing and strictly regulating militarized police and "no knock" entries;
- Abolishing the death penalty, "death by incarceration" sentencing, and the charging of children as adults;
- Exercising clemency powers in favor of condemned prisoners, people serving sentences beyond life expectancy, and those who were convicted for confessions under torture—especially children;
- Strictly regulating solitary confinement and other forms of restrictions in detention in accordance with international standards;
- Eliminating free or poorly paid prison labor; and
- Reducing former felon disenfranchisement.
"Our findings," said Méndez, "point to the critical need for comprehensive reform."
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Dear Gov. DeSantis: You're a History Grad. Please Tell Me When Systemic Racism Ended
Greater unity around a shared understanding of history is exactly what DeSantis fears. Maybe all those history courses taught him that—though he clearly learned the wrong lesson.
Feb 27, 2023
When Ron DeSantis was asked by a Fox News host two years ago if the United States is “systemically racist,” the Florida governor quickly responded: “It’s a bunch of horse manure.” He went on to boast that he had banned such ideas in Florida’s schools.
Boisterously banning books, educational curricula and college programs that address racism or LGBTQ dignity – or both (with added bigotry toward writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde) – DeSantis is building his national “anti-woke” profile as he seems to be readying a presidential campaign against his former hero Donald Trump.
DeSantis is a Yale history and Harvard law graduate, who taught high-school history after Yale. Even DeSantis probably agrees that U.S. slavery was systemic racism. And I’m somewhat certain he agrees that legally enforced Jim Crow racial discrimination in the U.S. South was systemic racism, including Florida’s toxic racial-oppression-by-law that lasted for 100 years after the Civil War.
As late as 1967, sixty miles from where DeSantis would later grow up, this law was enacted by the city of Sarasota, Florida:
"Whenever members of two or more…races shall…be upon any public…bathing beach within the corporate limits of the City of Sarasota, it shall be the duty of the Chief of police or other officer…in charge of the public forces of the City...with the assistance of such police forces, to clear the area involved of all members of all races present."
Gov. DeSantis, who dislikes questioning from actual journalists (as opposed to Fox News hosts), seems bent on riding white fragility, anger and grievance into the White House. He should be confronted at every opportunity to answer a simple question: If it’s currently “horse manure,” when did systemic racism end in our country?
If his answer is 1964, when Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, DeSantis should be directed to Sarasota’s 1967 city ordinance. If his answer is that it ended with the 2008 election of biracial Barack Obama, he should be asked to explain persistent patterns of racial discrimination that outlived the Obama presidency.
For example: racial segregation in housing and wide-ranging barriers to black home ownership like redlining and predatory bank lending. That’s also systemic racism and it’s happened in both North and South -- as Newsday showed recently in its exhaustive study of discrimination faced by minority potential homeowners on Long Island, New York.
Today, racially segregated neighborhoods lead to segregated schools, with people of color systemically offered inferior educational opportunities. The highest percentage of predominantly single-race schools in the 2020/21 school year were found not in the South, but in the Northeast and Midwest, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Environmental racism is long-standing and enduring in our country as pollution and cancer-causing industries hit communities of color disproportionately, causing death and disease – compounded by pervasive racial disparities in the provision of medical care.
DeSantis hopes to run for president as a “law-and-order” candidate with the endorsements of police unions. He should be asked about criminal justice and police practices that systematically treat black citizens and other people of color differently and worse than whites. That’s a present-day problem, as shown in study after study across the country. After the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, for example, the U.S. Justice Department investigated the Ferguson, Missouri, police department and found that racial bias and the city’s need for revenue resulted in routine Constitutional violations that disproportionately affected African Americans – with officers “stopping people without reasonable suspicion, arresting them without probably cause, and using unreasonable force against them.”
When DeSantis was reelected governor last November in a landslide, he received only 13 percent of the black vote, according to exit polls. I’ve been spending my winters in Florida, where it’s hard not to see black poverty, despair, and segregated neighborhoods. Yet DeSantis looks away.
When I attended public elementary and middle schools in Detroit in the 1960s, we didn’t learn much of any black history. Today’s champions of white victimhood claim that the teaching of ethnic history and ongoing/systemic racism stokes guilt feelings among white students and anger between students of different racial groups. If we’d had such teaching back in Detroit, I think it would have indeed prompted anger among black and white students -- not at each other, but at the persistent patterns of racism in our country . . . with many motivated to activism.
But greater unity around a shared understanding of history is exactly what DeSantis fears. He’s a divide-and-conquer politician, in the tradition of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he has the Ivy League degrees to prove it.
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