Living Justice by Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen

Author:Jessica Blank & Erik Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

As we drove off, we were silent, gazing out our respective windows into blackness. We’d circled David’s neighborhood so many times before that now we were able to find our way out without the map, and we stayed quiet as we snaked back to the main roads, thinking about how even the strongest souls can be so fragile when shoved up against force and bars and concrete. We’d met enough exonerated folks by now that we were beginning to make connections among them; as conversation started up again, we talked about Delbert and David, two such spiritual men, their roots not too far apart, who’d wound up in such incredibly different places. If David had some of the resources, community, and experience that had seen Delbert through, he might be up in Chicago instead of in Quincy, solid in his faith instead of feeling forced to question it. We talked about what it is that allows some people to come out the other side of such experiences, while others get trapped inside them forever. And we wondered, if it were us, which category we’d fall into.

We also talked about what we’d observed as we traveled through the South. Honestly, we had hoped to come down here and find that our assumptions were wrong—to find that the racial politics of the South had completely changed since the bad old days. And certainly, we found that the heroes of the civil rights movement had caused significant, undeniable, and beautiful progress. But old habits die hard: we saw the poverty and harassment that plagued many of the black folks we met, and we also found a strong resistance to change among some of the white folks—a desire to keep things the same, as if keeping things the same would keep them safe. It’s probably no accident that the towns where the white folks are struggling hardest to hold on to old “traditions” are also the ones with the highest unemployment rates in the country. It’s easier to blame an unknown Other—or a whole race of them—than it is to take apart the policies and mind-sets that cause poverty and injustice. Easier to just decide a group of people are different from and worse than you, and blame them for your problems. And once you’ve done that, it’s not so hard to take the next step of believing those folks are violent criminals—whether they actually are or not—and locking them up. We were starting to see that this pattern was still all too common.

As we talked, we realized that it’s not just the South: this same pattern informs how people treat each other throughout the entire country. It’s as if the Bill of Rights stops at the railroad tracks and wraps itself warmly around only one side of town. And it’s not even exclusively a racial division; more than anything, the dividing line is based on class. So many of the people we’d met seemed to have been unjustly villainized, locked up, thrown into unimaginably horrific circumstances—basically by virtue of being poor.

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