I was thrown against the wall…
Ten years ago I attended a gathering of clergy associated with the PICO National Network (info here). We went to New Orleans five years after hurricane Katrina revealed some of the deepest racial disparities in the local and national response to the devastating event. There, with clergy from across the country, a significant percentage of them Black, I was first exposed to the idea of systemic racism. As the legal scholar and civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander spoke about the premise of her book, The New Jim Crow, I was thrown against the wall by the power of her message and its deeply disturbing content.
“Jim Crow” is a term that describes the cultural, economic, and geographic unintended policies and systemic behaviors that result in racial inequality. Alexander uses the term to characterize our current justice system (prisons, courts, police) that ultimately results in huge inequities in the way Blacks and whites are treated—disparities that cannot be accounted for by crime rates in communities of color. For the most part it is the result of a “war on drugs” that puts minor offenders behind bars. By criminalizing drug use rather than considering it a medical condition, we’ve reached a time where Black men make up one third of the prison population though they are only 12% of the general population. Contrary to popular belief they do not commit offenses in greater proportion to whites.
As one of only a handful of rabbis in the room, we felt the burden of our whiteness and our Jewishness. After all, we were the ones who marched with Martin Luther King. We are proud of our past in the civil rights movement! To learn that our system continues to discriminate in ways that were outlined by Alexander in her speech and further clarified in her book was devastating. How could this great country and its storied justice system be so unjust for people of color?
Hear Michelle Alexander speak about the New Jim Crow.
Find the book here.
— Rabbi Ron Stern