Michelle Alexander on The New Jim Crow, at Union Theological Seminary

[Music] thank you thank you I'm happy to be here tonight oh I am happy to be here thank you [Music] thank you [Music] I am so glad to be here at Union Theological Seminary surrounded by so many people of faith and people of conscience beautiful souls who are dedicated to Justice not just in theory but in practice in daily life in so many ways I feel like coming to Union is like coming home I've had the opportunity to meet with many of you um in the past two days and classrooms and Rich discussions and debates and this feels like family feels like home I am in love with the spirit of this place and thrilled by the work that so many of you are doing opening hearts and minds and transforming lives and communities I especially want to thank Serene Jones and Judith Moyers for inviting me here tonight to participate in this wonderful lecture series I am in awe of the steadfast commitment and remarkable contributions that both Judith and Bill Moyers have made to social justice so to be here at Union at Judas invitation you know a work day just doesn't get much better than this so um thank you thank you so much for having me here tonight well I've been giving some thought to what I want to say tonight a lot of thought after all we're all coming together here tonight to explore the meaning of race and Justice at a particularly critical moment in our nation's history a time when it seems as though we may be once again at a fork in the road of course it's always tricky business to make predictions or Assessments in the midst of great crisis Dr Martin Luther King Jr himself pointed out that difficulty nearly a century ago he said quote whenever I'm asked my opinion of the current state of the Civil Rights Movement I am forced to pause it is not easy to describe a crisis so profound that it has caused the most powerful nation in the world to stagger in confusion and bewilderment well in recent months as our nation has reeled from Michael Brown and Eric Garner's senseless killings and the refusal of consecutive grand juries to issue indictments confusion and bewilderment has flowed flowed his tears rage shame disbelief and more than a bit of denial this particular crisis may feel sudden and new to some but its roots are as old as the country itself we continue to live the Paradox of a Nation founded with the Bold Preamble that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights including life liberty and the pursuit of happiness while at the same time denying all of those basic civil and human rights to slaves and writing into the original Constitution the rule that black people counted as only three-fifths of a human being this Paradox of a Nation founded with lofty ideals of freedom and equality but extending those ideals primarily to wealthy white men is the founding Paradox of our nation and it remains a paradox to this day even now as a black man sits in the Oval Office for years now I have been obsessed with this paradox not its theoretical existence but it's concrete manifestation in the brutal system of mass incarceration a penal system unlike anything this world has ever seen I've been obsessed I have been traveling from coast to coast speaking to just about anyone who will listen saying pretty much the same thing over and over again I have been talking and talking and talking about the ways in which our nation from its founding from the very very beginning has repeatedly birthed and maintained extraordinary systems of racial and social control and continues to do so even now even as most of us claim to be colorblind even in the age of Obama over and over and over I've repeated the basic facts more African-Americans are under Correctional control today in prisoner jail on probation or parole then were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the Civil War began and since John Legend repeated those words the Academy Awards people have said and I've heard people saying well those numbers really aren't so bad because there are a lot more black people you know alive today than there were back then so those numbers aren't so bad and it's true that mass incarceration doesn't affect everyone in fact it affects a relatively small segment of American society one defined by race and class but within that segment it has come for nearly everyone Nationwide about a third of black men can expect to spend time behind bars but if you lack a high school diploma as many do as most do in many inner city communities that figure Rises to about 60 percent and then if you count all those who have been saddled with criminal records who may have been lucky enough to get just felony probation never mind the millions were all stopped Frisk searched and monitored for no good reason as at all as well as all of the thousands who are cited for loitering or jaywalking in the names of broken windows policing the Practical equivalent of the Black Codes in poor communities of color well now you're beginning to get a picture of an entire community's defined by race and class under Perpetual Correctional control or surveillance and relegated to a permanent second-class status in many urban areas today more than half of working age African-American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalize discrimination for the rest of their lives in cities like Chicago Detroit Philly Newark and likely New York the statistics are even worse and once branded a criminal or felon you're ushered into a parallel social Universe in which the basic civil and human rights that apply to others no longer apply to you you may be stripped legally of the very right supposedly one in the Civil Rights Movement like the right to vote the right to serve on juries and the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment housing access to education and basic public benefits so many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly Left Behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon that's why I say we haven't ended racial cast in America we've merely redesigned it in many ways it seems as though that the birth of this new cast-like system was foreshadowed by the U.S Constitution itself perhaps we should have all seen this coming for the 13th Amendment in the united states ratified following the Civil War explicitly abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime that's the loophole it's not true that slavery has been abolished in the United States it's simply not true if you've been convicted of a crime the U.S Constitution says slavery is just fine and in the 14th Amendment which was adopted with the express purpose of eradicating the vestiges of slavery and guaranteeing the right to vote in equal treatment under the law the same loophole appears again section 2 of the 14th Amendment states that the one-person one vote principle and the right to vote itself cannot be Abridged except in cases of rebellion or punishment for a crime it seems now in retrospect that the U.S Constitution itself nearly provided instruction for the legal formation of the next caste system it states quite explicitly that you may not enslave or deny equal treatment of the law or the right to vote or relegate any citizen to pertinent second-class status unless you first brand them a criminal and then at that moment they are deemed to have no Humanity at all and can be subject to precisely the same treatment as a slave over and over to audiences large and small in prisons and re-entry centers on college campuses churches judicial conferences just at anywhere people will listen to me I have been repeating the same message that we as a nation have done it again and I've been trying to expose the myths that have kept us asleep and in denial passively accepting this human rights nightmare that is occurring on our watch these powerful myths especially the myth that the explosion in our prison system can be explained simply by crime and crime rates it's not true it's just not true there's this myth that somehow black and brown folks have just brought all of this on themselves and the data the research shows it's just not true once I finally very belatedly woke up to the reality of this criminal Injustice system and came to realize that it is not just another institution in our society infected with racial bias but a primary engine of racial inequality in the United States and that we will never achieve quality education for poor kids of color or meaningfully address chronic joblessness and hopelessness as long as we continue to wage Wars on the most vulnerable and lock them up in Mass into a permanent second class status once it became clear to me that this punitive impulse towards them the others this impulse to control slay enslave and punish them lies at the root of all our divisive racial politics infecting every single social justice debate not just about crime but also about education zero tolerance Health Care housing the minimum wage and Beyond making a progressive alliance between poor and working-class white folks and folks of color nearly impossible as we are constantly pit against one another encouraged to blame ourselves and one another rather than grasping the bigger picture and asking the bigger questions and seeing our shared interests and dreams once I began to see that this pervasive punitive impulse towards poor people of color has less to do with crime than our racial history and our racial present which is why our criminal justice system functions more like a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention and control once I came to see this and finally woke up myself I became obsessed and so here I am tempted yet again to give you all a new Jim Crow lecture an overview of the war on drugs and the war on crime and how it all actually works as opposed to how it's advertised and how these wars and more importantly the war mentality the US versus them Search and Destroy lock them up and throw away the key has decimated communities of color and how our legal system has conspired to keep Millions cycling in and out of prison for the rest of their lives I'm tempted for I know that many people in this audience think that they know how the system works just like I once did but really don't some of you may think that you know how bad it is how discriminatory how the legal system is rigged but you don't really know the half of it just like I once thought that I knew but didn't but in the short time that I'm here tonight I really don't want to talk anymore about the problem and how he got here instead I want to wrestle with the big question the elephant in the room what does all this mean for us for people of faith people of conscience what are we called to do at this moment in our nation's history what does our faith and conscience demand of us now don't get me wrong understanding the problem really understanding it how we got to this moment in our nation's history is critically important if we don't really know our history truly understand it we are doomed to repeat it nothing could be more clear to me now but what I really want to do what I feel moved to do tonight is to challenge us to think about what this means for us as people of Faith people of conscience but I must say in challenging us to wrestle with this question I want to make clear that I'm not pretending to have any special insight into the answer I am not a theologian I believe that we desperately need a multi-racial multi-ethnic Interfaith Theology of Liberation for this era of mass incarceration but I'm not here to offer a theology tonight instead I'm here to tell you why I think we need one for much of my adult life I have been involved in various efforts to reform our justice system or obtain something like justice for people who have been discriminated against abused locked up locked out and disposed of like garbage it took me as a civil rights lawyer a long while to wake up to the reality that a new Jim Crow had been born but what I can tell you from my years of experience as a civil rights lawyer as a legislative Advocate as a coalition Builder as a media Advocate is this ultimately this Freedom struggle will not be won in the courtrooms OR in Halls of power there is no legal strategy or set of policy arguments that will end this history and cycle of creating cast-like systems in America for what we have here is a crisis of conscience the truth is we've become the most punitive nation in the world and the roots of our punitiveness have a great deal to do with race a Relentless punitive impulse the recurring impulse to punish and control poor people and people of color rather than view them as worthy of care compassion and concern what we face is a profound moral and spiritual crisis not merely a failure of public policy Mark Maurer the executive director of the sentencing project published the results of research in his book great book The Race to incarcerate the research showed that the most punitive nations in the world are the most diverse the most lenient the most compassionate nations are the most homogeneous it seems that an aspect of human nature is a punitive impulse towards those we label the others and so perhaps it should come as no surprise that a vicious backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifesting is Law and Order and a get tough movement combined with the economic collapse of inner city communities across America led to the birth of a penal system unlike anything the world had ever seen indeed it now seems fair to say that the future of American democracy itself as it continues to diversify in the years to come and with increasing economic inequality rests on whether we as a people ultimately rise to the challenge that this multi-racial multi-ethnic experiment in democracy presents and find a way to care for each other genuinely care for each other across the innumerable lines of race class ethnicity and difference if we are serious about doing more than just tinkering with the mass incarceration machine if we are serious about breaking our nation's habit of creating massive systems of racial and social control if we are serious about rising to the challenge that this Paradox of America presents Than People of faith and people of conscience are going to need to step up in a big way and show tremendous courage speak unpopular and inconvenient truths and offer a vision for justice that transcends the politics of power and privilege I am speaking now most especially to students here at Union do not look to the lawyers to do the work of defining what Justice Means though we certainly need lawyers today their skills and their talents as much as we need anyone do not look to the policy makers to define a vision of what the Beloved Community might look like once the walls of Jericho come tumbling down we need our policy makers creative determined inspired policy makers who are capable of imagining Alternatives and designing meaningful alternatives to status quo but I hope we never imagine not even for a moment that there is some quick policy fix that it's going to solve the ultimate dilemma we face and whatever you do please do not look to the politicians to provide moral Vision or courage especially President Barack Obama yes we need far more courage from our elected leaders for sure but do not look to them for we're looking to you it may not seem like people of Faith people of conscience people of courageous moral Vision are in high demand right now after all it seems that nearly every week there's some new poll or study showing that Americans are becoming ever more disenchanted with religion and drifting away from their faiths becoming more cynical about politics but for the past five years I've been speaking to thousands of people all over the country and one of the questions that I hear over and over again is who will be on Martin Luther King Jr be our leader in this movement to end mass incarceration this question used to really annoy me because I do not believe that we should be waiting around for some magical mythical leader to appear who will lead us all to the promised land like some Pied Piper with the rest of us following behind you know whistling their tune I am not a fan of the big leader to the rescue school of thought and so this question has bothered me for some time but recently I've started listening more carefully when the question is asked who will be our Dr King and I've come to believe that what people are really asking for isn't necessarily a leader to the rescue but instead they're expressing a deep need and a sincere desire for the kind of bold moral vision and radical alternative narrative and a model of courageous risk-taking and sacrifice that was offered by Dr King and by Malcolm X in his way I believe what they're asking for everywhere I go whether they may know it or not is what Dr Cornell West is aptly called prophetic fire and let me be clear that when using that term I do not mean to evoke images of men at pulpits Belling about Justice and pounding the lectern I mean this is a women of spirit lecture after all and yes and out of that note I remember when you know I was in law school I attended a panel where the topic was hate speech and there was this young female Professor named Mari matsuda on the panel and she was a beautiful young Asian-American woman very petite and she sat very still and very Serene while her other male panelists carried on making points and jabbing their fingers in the air and all of them insisting that while of course we must hate abhor hate speech we must absolutely must value the First Amendment right to say anything to anyone anywhere that First Amendment right must be deemed in Violet talking over one another interrupting anyone reaffirming the First Amendment and then when it was her turn to speak she spoke quietly and calmly and with such extraordinary conviction and yet humility that the whole room just hushed and hung on our every word you could literally hear a pin drop and she spoke what amounted to heresy in that elite law school setting she said that she believed that the 14th Amendment which guarantees the principle of equal treatment under the law and which was adopted following a civil war with the express purpose of reading our nation of a racial caste system that made a mockery of our democracy must be the one principle of our Constitution that trumps them all and therefore in her view no one in the United States should be viewed as possessing a constitutional right to engage in hate speech now I cannot tell you what a powerful impact she had on me and it wasn't what she said so much but how she said it she was utterly fearless and speaking her truth and she was refusing to resort to the tactics of power and control arguing and interrupting intimidating others into agreement or acquiescence or silence she was on fire in the most beautiful way and like anything I had ever quite seen before and so when I say to you students at Union that we are looking to you we desperately need you to bring your prophetic fire I'm asking you begging you to speak in your own voice your own truth and with a fearlessness and a determination that honors your most sacred beliefs and moral commitments we need you students a morality and students theology to speak your truth so that we might all muster the courage to do the same I personally have been struggling to muster my own courage and I will be eternally grateful for one man who helped us me to see that I could no longer hide from the spiritual dimensions of my own work I met him a few years ago while I was on the road talking about my book and the phenomenon of mass incarceration and at the time I was struggling with a feeling of depression and anxiety worrying that all of the work that I had put into writing the new Jim Crow was actually had all been for nothing it had begun as a strange nagging feeling actually a voice in my head or this recurring thought that kept repeating itself after every speech the voice said quietly but clearly all Sound and Fury but signifying nothing and I was at a loss as to why I would be hearing such a voice in my head I started thinking that God or the spirits of my ancestors were trying to send me a message that the work that I've been doing was for naught that it all meant nothing that I was accomplishing nothing and it's difficult to explain the distress that this thought this recurring thought this voice was causing me I should point out that my book had not yet become a bestseller in fact I was struggling mightily to get anyone to listen to the message I was desperately trying to share I was speaking in nearly empty church basements and to small crowds often begging people to let me come and share my message over the time crowds began to grow in size thanks in part to Bill Moyers and Amy Goodman who are among the first people to grant me an interview but you know I was getting tired and I was on the road away from my young children I'm actually quite an introvert by Nature so getting up in front of large crowds over and over again was scary and draining but I was doing it trying to share the facts wake people up tell the history share the data and then as I was trying to walk off the stage I would hear all Sound and Fury and signifying nothing and then a Moment of Truth came I was invited by the late great Vincent Harding Dr Vincent Harding to speak at the Isle of School of Theology in Denver and when I arrived he welcomed me like a long lost friend and then he sat me down and told me that he was grateful for my research and writing but that's not why he invited me he said in his slow low and steady voice the reason I invited you here my sister daughter niece and friend isn't because you gathered the evidence to indict the system no I invited you because you wrote that the time had come for us to stand with the despised the accused the convicted the least of these you didn't use the words of Jesus he said but I hear them what you do unto the least of these my brethren you do unto me and then he leaned in towards me held my gaze silently for a moment and said now that's the real message right and I'm not sure that I knew it then but that was the beginning of the end of the voice in my head I began to awaken to a new understanding of my own mission and purpose my job wasn't simply to speak as a lawyer or as an advocate or as an academic railing against the system thanks to Dr Harding's gentle blessing and reminder I felt called that I was to do my best to share a deeper more profound message about the meaning of this moment in our nation's history and to do the work with others to inspire an Awakening to the moral and spiritual dimensions of mass incarceration I came to see that large part of my job perhaps the most important part of my job was to dig for deeper truth and to speak that truth with a lot more courage over the years and especially in recent months I have found that too often in our rush to respond to a crisis or to a tragedy another police killing or in a rush to take action and just do something about something we skip that critical all important step of asking the question what is the truth not just the facts of who said what and when what came first or later not just the data and the statistics the cost of this or that not the debate about what the witnesses saw where his arms really raised all the way up how many seconds did it take before the police pulled the trigger no I mean what is the truth the deeper truth the truth that holds the power to transform to awakened to shake the foundations and allow something new and beautiful to burst forth what is the deeper truth and then once we begin to Glimpse that truth once we get a glimpse of it it's not enough to just hold it in our minds and play around with it like some kind of intellectual jigsaw puzzle if we're to make our lives useful if we were to be worthy of This Magnificent gift called life then we've got to get serious about sharing the fruits of this truth I would go so far as to say we must be the fruits of this truth for the in the end there's just no escaping it I mean one truth about the truth is that it never goes away it always comes back resurfacing a new forms sometimes masquerading in different guises but always shows up again daring us to face it so will we face it now will we face the truth speak the truth in this time in this age here's another truth about the truth and every time and in every age there are those who will deny the truth and those who will courageously confront it and do their best to rise to the challenge that moment in history presents I remember when I was a kid in school I was so ashamed and demoralized whenever teachers would start talking about slavery or Jim Crow the textbooks would show pictures of black people hanging from trees or whites only signs and I read about the fact that you know people who look like me were forced to sit at the back of the bus my teacher said they wanted us to see these pictures and learn the truth about slavery so we could understand the segregation and the horror of it all but my teachers as well intentioned as they were did not tell the whole truth they taught us about the pain and the suffering and the cruelty the dehumanization but they didn't say much about the Courage the resistance the love that endured the songs that were born in cotton fields and the Magnificent movements that were led by people who could barely read could not vote people who were thought to be less than human as Dr Harding has written there is a river a river of Courage love and rebellion and creative non-violent action a beautiful river runs through it all and that's the truth too the whole truth and the question I think as We Gather tonight is whether we are going to face the truth of our times and join that beautiful river that rock is sometimes dangerous river or not are we willing to join that River and widen that River so it eventually engulfs us all carrying us Downstream to a place we all belong or not I don't want to get carried away with metaphors here I want to be very clear and explicit about my meaning when I say that we need a multi-racial multi-ethnic Interfaith Theology of Liberation for this era of mass incarceration I am saying that we are called to build a new moral consensus in this country a revolutionary understanding about who we are as human beings who we are as children of God and what we owe one another and I'm not using this word revolutionary as mere rhetorical Flair after years of piecemeal policy reform and tinkering with the machine I now finally understand what Dr King meant when he said just months before his death after Selma after the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Acts had been passed he told a reporter quote for years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society a little change here a little change there now I feel quite differently I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire Society a revolution of values end quote frustrated by white resistance to addressing in any meaningful way decaying ghettos failing the schools structural joblessness and crippling poverty Dr King said that America must be reborn he said quote the dispossessed of this nation the poor both white and negro live in a cruelly unjust Society they must organize a revolution against that Injustice not against the lives of their fellow citizens but against the structures through which the society is refusing to lift the load of poverty end quote and then when speaking to his staff at the southern Christian leadership conference in 1967 staff who were concerned that the Civil Rights Movement had lost its Steam and Direction King said the time had come to shift from a civil rights movement to a human rights movement political reform efforts were no longer adequate to the task at hand he said quote for the past 12 years we have been in a reform movement but after Selma and the Voting Rights bill we moved into a new era which must be an era of Revolution we must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary Movement we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society and quote well today I fear that many civil rights lawyers and Advocates like myself have been stuck in a model of advocacy the King was determined to leave behind rather than challenging the basic structure of our society and doing the hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all colors we have been tempted too often by the opportunity of people of color to be included within the political and economic structure as is and we allowed ourselves to be willfully blind to the emergence of a new caste system a system of social excommunication that has denied millions of poor people and people of color basic human dignity I don't think the significance of this can be overstated for the failure to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all people has lurked at the root of every caste system this Common Thread explains why in the 1780s the British Society for the abolition of slavery adopted as its official seal a wood cut of a kneeling slave above a banner that read am I not a man and a brother that symbol was followed more than a hundred years later by signs worn around the necks of black sanitation workers during the Poor People's campaign answering the slave's question with a simple statement I am a man and yet here we are decades later with a black man in the White House and most Americans claiming to be colorblind and thousands of people are holding signs eerily reminiscent of Errors we supposedly Left Behind reminding a forgetful nation that black lives matter the fact that I sign is necessary like that today in protest of yet another caste-like system suggests that the model of civil rights advocacy that has been employed for the past several decades is not as king predicted adequate to the task at hand if we can agree that what is needed now at this critical juncture Is Not Mere tinkering or tokenism but as king insisted more than 40 years ago a radical restructuring of our society then perhaps we can also agree that a radical restructuring of our approach to advocacy is in order as well and I dare say though I'm not a theologian perhaps a radical new approach to our theology is in order as well for those of us who consider ourselves people of faith and people of conscience we must acknowledge that we we have been far too quiet for far too long as our nation built a penal system predicated on denying to God's children the very forms of forgiveness compassion and opportunities for Redemption that we claim to cherish what sort of theology tolerates this complicit silence perhaps the revolution must first begin within us chorus there are those who tell me that my newfound revolutionary spirit is misplaced especially now that there is so much progress being made through traditional political channels to end mass incarceration in America I'm often asked aren't I thrilled by marijuana legalization aren't I delighted that the Koch brothers and Newt Gingrich are sitting down at the same table with the ACLU in the center for American progress to come up with a grand plan to end mass incarceration aren't I glad that President Obama granted clemency to eight people convicted of non-violent drug offenses isn't it great that the justice department just issued a report finding a pattern of practice of discrimination and the Ferguson Police Department aren't I delighted that the new mayor of New York City finally settled the stop and frisk case over and over again people ask me did you ever think back when you were writing your book that any of this would be possible and I have to say yes yes I definitely I definitely thought it was possible and in many ways it is what I feared as a nation we are on the verge of doing many of the right things for the wrong reasons now don't get me wrong I am a supporter of marijuana legalization in fact I believe the simple possession of all drugs for personal use should be decriminalized I believe we should follow the example set by Portugal which has decriminalized all drugs the simple possession of all drugs and after 10 years they reported rates of drug addiction abuse went down as they reinvested all that money they spent caging people into drug treatment and providing education and support to people who may be at risk of drug addiction and I am glad there is emerging bipartisan support for reducing harsh mandatory minimum sentences for some non-violent drug crimes as well as reforms for you know mentally ill people that make it more likely that they'll get health care treatment rather than a jail cell but when considering whether marijuana legalization and the recent bipartisan initiatives represent genuine progress and by that I mean truly transformational change I think we should ask ourselves have we as a nation changed our minds about the dignity and value of those people whose lives have been destroyed by the drug war if we simply change our minds about marijuana if legalization is motivated primarily by our changing views of the drug the growing consensus in the medical community that marijuana is actually less harmful than alcohol or tobacco but our views about them those who've been targeted in Mass for minor drug crimes hasn't really changed then we haven't made much progress from a racial Justice perspective similarly we've got to ask ourselves whether the prime and driving the new bipartisan and infall Justice but that enthusiasm has been driven primarily by a new Awakening to the value of the lives and communities that have been destroyed or is this enthusiasm driven primarily by concerns about the costs of this massive prison State and reluctance to raise taxes on the predominantly white middle class truly transformative change will come when and only when we change rules laws policies and practices because we have opened our hearts and our minds for the better regarding the dignity and value of all people of all colors no matter who they are where they came from or what they may have done [Applause] [Music] by doing the right thing for the wrong reasons we save lives today only to lose them tomorrow for what we know what we certainly ought to know by now is that systems of racial and social control adapt and morph over time adapting to the needs and constraints of the time and ultimately what lies at the core of the current caste system is a flawed public consensus a failure to care to really care across the lines of race and class the belief that some lives simply don't matter and it is this failure to care that lies at the core of every cast-like system that has ever existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world so I Rejoice for the wise that may be spared by this new bipartisan Alliance but I am filled with grief for the lives we will certainly lose tomorrow if we do not find a way to steer this ship in a radically different direction and develop a new moral consensus and so yes I am glad that mayor the new mayor of New York has stopped fighting the brilliant litigation brought by the center for constitutional rights challenging the city's discriminatory and abusive stop and frisk practices but I have to pause and take a deep breath as I consider how far he and we have truly come for even as he entered into a landmark consent decree and spoke the truth about his son and what he needs to be aware of when dealing with the police he has practically in the same breath clung to and reaffirmed the cruel and immoral Doctrine known as broken windows policing and for those who are unfamiliar broken windows policing is the notion that the best way to make our community safe and secure is to come down with a hammer on people who commit the most minor of infractions not at all people of course for broken windows policing is not practiced in the wealthy neighborhoods but only in the poorest and most vulnerable communities of color the notion that to effectively deal with them the others we must arrest and find and cite people in Mass for things like selling untaxed cigarettes riding a bicycle on the sidewalk or jaywalking this Zero Tolerance purely punitive mentality and impulse believing this is how you make a community safe this is how you keep them under control the belief system lies at the very root of all that is wrong with so much of our politics and our justice system today perhaps you've heard the old saying when all you've got is a hammer then everything looks like a nail and when it comes to poor communities and communities of color all we bring is the hammer everyone in these communities is treated as Nails Nails to be pounded Down Beat Down controlled beat into submission now I will not deny that broken windows are a sign of distress in a community if they are a regular occurrence just like trash in the streets or hostile graffiti on the walls when plentiful those are signs and I'll be the first to acknowledge that ignoring these signs of distress comes at a price a price that is paid first and foremost by the people who live in those communities the critical question though is how do we respond to these signs do we bring the hammer or do we I'm asking you as people of faith of people of conscience do we not have other tools at our disposal and if we do and I know we do what sort of crime in the eyes of God do we commit by failing to use them and please do not believe it when people say oh these are only little misdemeanor offenses no big deal we now need to be too concerned about these citations these misdemeanor arrests for after all it was just a minor misdemeanor that Eric Garner was accused of selling loose untaxed cigarettes when a police officer saw fit to choke him to death for his crime of course that's an extreme case yet the point remains if you know anything at all about how this system works you know that if you're poor you likely can't pay that misdemeanor fine and you might lose your job because at the time you spent showing up in court and these misdemeanor fencers they too can follow you for the rest of your life in this era of Technology they can show up on background checks they can be the reason you're denied employment denied access to housing and suddenly this little misdemeanor offense is the reason you're unemployed or homeless and now this little misdemeanor is being used against you in your sentencing hearing because you robbed a convenience store or sold some weed because you were hungry or desperate for cash and then the judge looks at you and says the words repeat offender and the prosecutor says yeah he's nothing but a troublemaker he's had a number of run-ins with the law so yes it matters it really matters when we show up in the lives of poor people with nothing but a hammer Jesus taught that he who was without sin should cast the first stone well we have become a nation of stone throwers and in this era of mass incarceration it is not enough to drop your own Stone we have got to be willing to catch the stones raining down on the most vulnerable and we must be willing to stand up to the stone throwers and disarm them I believe [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I believe we now find ourselves at a fork in the road we can continue down the road most traveled the road of business and Politics as Usual the path of reforming our political institutions here and there the path Dr King was determined to leave behind or we can choose a different path the rocky dangerous path that comes without a map it's a path that's beckoning us again thanks in large part to the courage of the young people in Ferguson who stood up when Michael Brown was shot down and inspired thousands of people to wake up get up and March here in New York City and Beyond if we choose this Rocky path there will be no guidebook no map no instructions all we will have is our moral compass and the whisperings of the angels and our ancestors in our ears reminding us to dig for deeper truth and to speak and to act with greater courage reminding Us in the words of Dr James comb that Humanity's salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst as I see it proving that solidarity means being willing to speak unpopular difficult truths never avoiding the racial Dimensions or the profound moral questions for purposes of expediency it means never Seeking Justice on the sheep but always demanding full restoration and reparation for those who have been harmed the most it means being on fire for justice and believing with undying faith that the slaves who sung songs of freedom in the cotton fields and the immigrants who are toiling in the fields today and those who risk their lives on the freedom rides or who marched in Selma and those who face tear gas and Ferguson and those who marched carrying signs saying black lives matter on the streets of New York City were not foolish to believe that America can be born again we can and we must build a movement and not only mass incarceration and mass deportation but a broad-based radical human rights movement that ends once and for all our histories cycle of creating cast-like systems in America a movement for Education not incarceration jobs not jails a movement to end all forms of legal discrimination against people released from prison discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work to shelter to food a movement for voting rights for all including Those Behind Bars voting rights for people who are prisoners is common in other Western democracies but not here in America a movement that will end the war on drugs once and for all and shift to a public health model for dealing with drug addiction and drug abuse a movement that will stand up to the police unions and transform the police itself from Warriors and to peace officers directly accountable to the communities they serve yes a movement that will ensure that every dollar saved from ending the wars that have been declared on poor commies of color the wars on crime and drugs will be reinvested back into those communities the community is most harmed meaningful reparations and justice reinvestment a movement that abandons our purely punitive approach to dealing with violence and violent crimes and Embraces a more restorative and rehabilitative approach one that takes seriously the interest of the victim the offender and the community is whole a movement that is rooted in the awareness of the dignity and Humanity of us all no matter who we are where we came from or what we may have done I believe it will be said when the history of this movement is written that this place Union Theological Seminary was at the Forefront offering for all people of all colors ethnicities and faiths a Theology of Liberation and ethics of Justice a vision of what love looks like in public I pray that this year 2015 will be the year that King's Revolution was finally born the non-violent Revolution he prayed for and died for finally the sleeping giant woke up got up and walked and chose The Road Less Traveled and that I believe historians one day will say ultimately made all the difference thank you so much for having me here tonight thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] as to where to begin the process of asking questions and involving everyone and I just want to say thank you so much uh for your courage and everything so when we think about this pre-revolutionary moment and the movement that we are looking for finding the leaders who have that combination of compassion and heart and Clarity to work with that clear and precise critical analysis and the ability to see with Focus where we need to go and not to be distracted by the things that spin around us trying to lead us off in the wrong direction that is a rare thing and we have that in you and it you are blessing all of us with your leadership so we have time for just two questions and I have had these uh questions um given to me on a iPad so um I think the first one is one that we've been wrestling with here is how do you relate mass incarceration in the new Jim Crow to immigration detention that is such a good question you know um I had the opportunity to speak with a wonderful group of Union students earlier today and this question came up then as well and I think it's so important and you know I am a big believer that the movement and mass deportation should not be separate in any way from the movement to end mass incarceration that they are one movement they ought to be viewed as one movement because at their core they're about precisely the same thing it's about whether we view poor people of color as people who are deserving of our care compassion and concern or whether we respond with a purely punitive impulse towards them and what we see with the call to get tough and Crackdown on immigrants and the calls from some to deport even children back to countries where they might face certain death this this willingness to dispose of the others is at the core of the drug war of the wars that have been declared domestically on poor people of color in the United States in various forms and that we ought to view the movement and the math criminalization of immigrants and mass deportation as part of the same movement to end mass incarceration it's about fundamentally whether we care about poor people and people of color and what kind of basic human rights and dignity we feel they deserve but I think there's some real challenges to getting there um there's two in particular that come to mind one is that within the Immigrant Rights Movement itself there has been a tendency among many well-intentioned Advocates to say things like we're not criminals where immigrants we're good hard-working criminals we're not we're good hard-working people we're not criminals and I've seen in some marches for immigration reform and immigrants and signs that literally say we are not criminals right well once you say that say we're not them we are not criminals the bad people we're the good people therefore we're deserving of your care compassion and concern you've developed a a fault line within the movement I believe that we should honor the criminality within all of us because the reality is is we are all criminals we are all criminals just as we are all sinners we've all done wrong in our lives we've all made mistakes this idea that the criminals are them not us we're not the criminals they're the criminals criminals are other people not us it's pure fiction if you're an adult you've broken the life at some point they've broken the law at some point in your life you have we're all Sinners we're all criminals but some of us are punished for our mistakes for the rest of our lives some of us are treated as inherently disposable that's the issue it's not whether some of us make mistakes or not or whether some of us are sinned or whether some of us have committed crimes or not it's that we are all human beings worthy of care compassion and concern now of course you know it doesn't mean that some people don't need to be removed from our society for a period of time if someone is commits a violent crime that poses risk to our community do they need to be removed of course we do of course they do but I am a prison abolitionist in the sense that I believe we should end prisons as we know them as sites of dehumanization dehumanization and cruelty and humiliation um and we need to reimagine what Justice looks like for people who have committed violent crimes and so I am a big believer that we need to join these movements but we also need to address the divisions that exist within them one of the other major challenges for bringing these movements together is that many African Americans I'm sad to say resent Latino immigrants there's a lot of fear that Latino immigrants are taking their jobs taking away from them and what we have are you know folks you know fighting over crumbs thrown from the table and so we have got to change that mentality of are they taking from us are they taking our jobs away from us and say no we all have basic human rights to work to Quality education to security to house and we all have basic human rights and that impulse to say they're taking my job therefore I want to punish them or control them or dispose of them is precisely the same thing that led poor and working-class whites in the south you know as the Civil Rights Movement was getting underway to say no I don't want them taking my job I don't want to have to compete with them on equal terms it's fear that keeps us divided and apart fighting over crumbs thrown from the table rather than recognizing the dignity and Humanity of us all and standing in solidarity with each other as we build a truly you know revolutionary human rights movement on behalf of us all [Music] so another question and this will be the last one and it's a huge question you you pointed out early that this punitive dominating Dynamic of control is more prevalent in cultures that are diverse um it seems to me that in the United States though it it adheres to um I mean you could say it's it's cross race but it's particularly tied up with white identity um and that thinking and talking about whiteness and its brutality is a key part of this rather than always in sort of General racialized categories with respect to that that punitive impulse and its roots also in very particular ways in Christianity so there you go um well yes I think that's you know I'm people often say to me well don't black folks want much of the get tough stuff that politicians are selling them and it's certainly true that many African-Americans want and have asked for more police and communities with high levels of violence and many black politicians have supported get tough measures out of desperation to deal with real problems of crime and violence in their communities but what's interesting is that the research shows that even black folks living in high crime communities are less punitive than white folks who face little risk of being exposed to violent crime and so there is something happening here um you know with this punitive impulse that has much to do with race and isn't simply about our response to crime or fears about violence but I think it is important that we own the fact that this punitive impulse lies within all of us and that it isn't simply a white impulse to punish but it's an Impulse that is seems embedded perhaps in part of aspect of human nature to want to punish the other punish those who seem different punish those we are afraid of or fearful of in some way and therefore as we build a movement it isn't enough to look over there and say well you all are so much more punitive than we are we also have to be willing to look within our own communities and you know I can say for the black community we have a lot of work to do too you know there has been a lot of Shame and anger and punitiveness that has existed within our own communities because we have blamed ourselves and one another for mass incarceration and you know part of the reason I wrote the book was to help people to see what I finally did which is that we didn't ask for this for them we didn't bring this on ourselves this massive new system of racial and social control has much more to do with our racial divisions anxieties than it has to do with crime or crime rates or what's actually going on um in terms of drug use or drug abuse or rates of crime in these communities there's something much larger going on that we need to deal with and reckon with if we are ever not only to end mass incarceration but break this habit that our nation is acquired of creating these cast-like systems in America foreign

Channel: Union Theological Seminary

Views: 82,873

Keywords: The New Jim Crow (Book), Michelle Alexander (Author), Jim Crow Laws (Literature Subject), Seminary (Literature Subject), Union Theological Seminary In The City Of New York (College/University), race, justice, racial justice, Segregation, Social Justice (Political Ideology)

Id: T79I1PLT5Ks

Length: 63min 37sec (3817 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2015