Reprinted from Mike Malloy
We keep hearing that the American system of justice is failing or has failed where it concerns Black Americans, especially Black Men. But, is that true? If so, what is failing? The sentencing process that has put one in three Black men in some form of incarceration? The percentage of Blacks arrested on charges that would not be brought against whites? The percentage of non-whites that now account for the largest proportion of those in jail or prison -- a prison system that has the greatest number of its citizens locked down compared to any other country on earth? What is failing?
Perhaps nothing is failing. Maybe this is how the American justice system was designed to operate.
As pointed out by Albert Burneko writing recently at Deadspin.com...
"The murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Sam Shepherd, and countless thousands of others at the hands of American law enforcement are not aberrations, or betrayals, or departures. The acquittals of their killers are not mistakes. There is no virtuous innermost America, sullied or besmirched or shaded by these murders.
[...]"This is America. It is not broken. It is doing what it does."
Burneko adds --
"America employs the enforcers of its power to beat, kill, and terrorize, deploys its judiciary to say that that's OK, and has done this more times than anyone can hope to count. This is not a flaw in the design; this is the design."
Could Burneko be correct? If so, what does it say about the belief -- maybe an insane belief -- that our system of so-called justice can be reformed? Can it be re-structured to provide the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law?
Does it say, rather, that the current system must be completely brought down and replaced?
Burneko adds, policing in America is not broken. The judicial system is not broken. American society is not broken. All are functioning perfectly, doing exactly what they have done since before some of this nation's most prosperous slave-murdering robber-barons came together to consecrate into statehood the mechanisms of their barbarism.
The most damning of Burneko's observations is this one:
"Taken together with the myriad other indignities, thefts, and cruelties it visits upon black and brown people, and the work common white Americans do on its behalf by telling themselves bald fictions of some deep and true America of apple pies, Jesus, and people being neighborly to each other and betrayed by those few bad apples with their isolated acts of meanness, the public will demands and enables a whirring and efficient machine that does what it does for the benefit of those who own it. It processes black and brown bodies into white power."
What do you think truthseeker?
