Back in the dark ages of the 1960s, my dog and I spent an uneasy night in a New Mexico jail after being arrested at gunpoint for the sole reason that I was driving a Volkswagon.
After releasing us in the morning, the police chief treated me and the dog to a lavish breakfast at a local café and apologized for the arresting officer, whose brother had been shot two weeks previously by someone in a Volkswagon.
If driving a Volkswagon seems flimsy probable cause to arrest someone, it's no more flimsy than having dark hair and wearing a yellow shirt. Thanks to a new bill signed by the Arizona governor last week, however, police officers throughout the state have broad discretion to stop and detain anyone they might "reasonably suspect" of being an illegal immigrant: in other words, having dark hair, dark eyes, and meeting any other totally subjective stereotype of Mexican or South American aliens.
According to the Washington Post, "President Barack Obama has called the new law 'misguided' and has instructed the Justice Department to examine it to see if it's legal."
What the Justice Department already knows, and Obama likely will not mention, is that the Arizona law simply mirrors the language of the U.S. Supreme Court, which long ago in 1975 found racial profiling to be a legal basis for stopping and searching motorists. "The dirty little secret of policing is that the Supreme Court has actually granted the police license to discriminate," writes Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:
In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, the Court concluded it was permissible under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for the police to use race as a factor in making decisions about which motorists to stop and search. In that case the Court concluded that the police could take a person's Mexican appearance into account when developing reasonable suspicion that a vehicle may contain undocumented immigrants. The Court said that "the likelihood that any person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor."
Alexander's invaluable book is a compendium of such "dirty little secrets," exposing the overt and scarcely veiled racism that pervades our justice system at every level, from the local cop and DA to the U.S. Supreme Court. Thanks to the blatant racism of right-wing extremists since Obama took office, long-ignored racial issues are finally emerging from the shadows. The New Jim Crow is a timely and stunning guide to the labyrinth of propaganda, discrimination, and racist policies masquerading under other names that comprises what we call justice in America.
Like the notoriously racist War on Drugs, Alexander says, profiling laws like Arizona's are blatant excuses for persecuting and incarcerating a particular ethnic group. The result will inevitably be more resources poured into another prison-building boom, fed by media-generated fear of the dreaded undocumented alien. To Alexander's appalling note that we're incarcerating more black people today than our ancestors ever enslaved, Federal inmate Michael Santos adds:
We've locked up more than 2.3 million people in American prisons or jails. That deplorable number represents more prisoners per capita than any other nation on earth! Taxpayers spend nearly $60 billion every year to warehouse their fellow citizens. The continuous expansion of prison budgets has resulted in the diversion of funds from education, health care, and environmental preservation...
Within those walls, 2.3 million people invariably adhere to segregationist and discriminatory policies simply in order to survive. "I want to warn you about prison hate that turned me into a racist," says ex-con Joe Loya.
"It is easy to feign intolerance in order to survive in prison. ... But like an undercover vice cop, you might forget that you are only playing a role and end up becoming what you are fighting against."
"There is no question that conditions within our prisons reflect the racism endemic in society as a whole," says inmate Enceno Macy, recounting the dilemma for a mixed-race inmate forced to align himself with only the visible aspect of his heritage.
"Obama doesn’t represent these people, any more than he represents me or the other 900,000 black prisoners in America. In fact, Obama in no way represents the end of what has been and still is racial discrimination. He does not look to make decisions that will drastically change things for black people. Quite the opposite, in fact. He looks to appease the politicians around him, just as any dem of any other color would. Maybe he feels even more pressure to do what others want because he desires white America to see him as no different from a white. Maybe he hopes to relax or reduce the whites’ reflexive apprehension of blacks. I don’t know."
Adding to Alexander's impeccably documented research and the first-hand stories of inmates are recent studies confirming the racial bias that has created and fed America's lust for incarceration. One study links color-blind ideology itself to racism.
"If you subscribe to a color-blind racial ideology, you don't think that race or racism exists, or that it should exist," author Tynes said. "You are more likely to think that people who talk about race and racism are the ones who perpetuate it. You think that racial problems are just isolated incidents and that people need to get over it and move on. You're also not very likely to support affirmative action, and probably have a lower multi-cultural competence."
In "Study Settles it: Shocking Black & Latino Imprisonment Rates the Result of Racist, Punitive Impulse"another study found one of the most salient and consistent predictors of American punitiveness to be racial animus, concluding, "this finding suggests that a prominent reason for the American public's punitiveness -- including the embrace of mass imprisonment and the death penalty -- is the belief that those disproportionately subject to these harsh sanctions are people they do not like: African American offenders."
Assuming the nation and government wake up to the all-pervading racism in our justice system, what then? Obviously we can't as a nation release a million or so prisoners with breakfast and an apology, as did that long ago New Mexico police chief. How do we acknowledge a cruel mistake on such a vast scale, and even more crucial, how do we fix it?
"That's what scares me," says Mary Jo Smith, an Estacada, Oregon, activist. "I talk to my legislators about the prison boom and racist so-called justice, and they admit the problem, but haven't a clue, they say, how to reduce this [prison] population. But they know that we can't have a draft, that our troops are worn out with endless wars, so the prison population is a dream come true for the military – the perfect source of cannon fodder.
"That's what I fear is coming -- brilliant in its perversity: the new Buffalo Soldiers. They'll call it the Trapdoor Draft. And coming soon, the new version of Obama-care: no health insurance? It's jail time or Afghanistan, pal. Take your choice."
