Part I — Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America’s History of Racial Injustice by Bryan Stevenson
The experience of black people, especially black boys and men, in the criminal justice system is disproportionately distinct from any other demographic in the United States. But many individuals are still struggling to digest this weighted truth; that is because, as a country, we still yet to acknowledge our racial history. And though we cannot change it, it can enable us to shape a more just future.
Black and brown people “are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness.” The assumption of born-inferiority is what Ibram X. Kendi explains as being stamped from the beginning. It is perpetuated by what Stevenson calls “deep historical forces,” aging centuries before colonization and enslavement. But my reflection wants to shed light on how we continuously begin over and over again to safeguard racial ideologies.
We begin in the 1600’s when the institution of slavery was formed; and begin again after the Emancipation Proclamation when “the solution to free” blacks was criminalization through the 13th Amendment and convict leasing, lynching, segregation and Jim Crow; and again with police brutality and mass incarceration (as Michelle Alexander explains it “the new Jim Crow”). There has never been the eradication of racial institutions when we know systemic oppressions derive from the ideologies that defend them and the “systemic community-based violence” that preserves them.
And we’ll begin, yet again, with my reflection of how Stevenson help me better understand the causation between lynching and capital punishment.
Black people being stamped as slaves only evolved to being stamp as criminals, resulting in the largest demographic to be incarcerated in the United States. “Nowhere,” Stevenson firmly states, is “the animus toward black people more evident than in the criminal justice system.” An enormous factor of the inequality within our justice system remains in the history of lynching (from the Civil War until WWII). Primarily, lynching deeply affected our country’s justification of punishment and carried with it a complex history of victimizing the entire African American/Black community, and not simply “the alleged perpetrator of the crime.” Lynching had many inhumane effects, especially one that follows us all the way to present day: the death penalty.
As lynching declined in the U.S., the introduction of capital punishment took its place, providing yet another example of how we “begin again” to reinforce racial ideologies. But “the prospect of being executed rather than being lynched did little to increase the fairness of trial,” rather it continued a vicious cycle of reinventing systems aimed to lock up “criminals.” Whether it be from unfair trials from racial biased juries or plea bargains and unfair sentencing; not mentioning all other adversities in the pretrial stages, of which I am still learning. Stevenson explains, “By the end of the 1930s, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time ever.” Two-thirds of the population that were executed were African American/Black individuals. And since 1976, 34% of executions have been of black people.
In 2017, Black people made up of less than 13% of the national population and nearly 42% of individuals on death row were Black individuals. After reviewing the U.S. Census Bureau and the current U.S. Death Row Population, I can assure you that relatively nothing has changed. Undeniably, our data reflects the “racial violence of the past.” And I must agree with Stevenson when he says that “unprecedented levels of mass incarceration in America today stand as a continuation of these past distortions and abuses, still limiting opportunities” to “our nation’s more vulnerable communities.”
We have made great strides, especially the 2019–2020 Emmett Till Antilynching Act that states, “Only by coming to terms with history can the United States effectively champion human rights abroad.” I have to add that this is still very much a domestic issue. We must remind ourselves that social, racial and economic justice is an on-going mission. There are still 25 states that allow capital punishment and 3 that have governor imposed moratoriums, and twelve of those remain the twelve states in which lynching was most active: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
My reflection is not to discourage you. It is to motivate you to dig below the surface in order to truly understand the complexity of the human psyche and therefore our systems. It is to enable you to identify where to end old beginnings and what genuinely constitutes as new. It is to empower you by acknowledging that you had nothing to do with the past, but have everything to do with determining a urgent present and a more just future.
