ERACISM Minute 9/30/18 - Lauralee Carbone

ERACISM Minute 9/30/18

Good morning! I’m Lauralee Carbone here with an ERACISM Minute, a minute of consciousness-raising from the BUF Black Lives Matter Ministry Action Team’s program. I’m going to talk about the color of justice, prosecutorial power, and your opportunity to make a difference with your vote for local prosecutor in the upcoming election.

The following information is from the book, THE NEW JIM CROW, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander.

The legal rules governing prosecutions, like those that govern sentencing decisions, maximize rather than minimize racial bias. No one has more power in the criminal justice system than prosecutors. The prosecutor is free to dismiss a case for any reason or no reason at all, regardless of the strength of the evidence. The prosecutor is also free to file more charges against a defendant than can realistically be proven in court, so long as probable cause arguably exists. Whether a good plea deal is offered to a defendant is entirely up to the prosecutor. And if the mood strikes the prosecutor can transfer drug defendants to the federal system, where the penalties are far more severe. Juveniles can be transferred to adult court, where they can be sent to adult prison. The most remarkable feature of these important, sometimes life-and-death decisions is that they are totally discretionary and virtually unreviewable.

Immunizing prosecutors from claims of racial bias and failing to impose any meaningful check on the exercise of their discretion in charging, plea bargaining, transferring cases, and sentencing has created an environment in which conscious and unconscious biases are allowed to flourish. At virtually every stage of pre-trial negotiation, whites are more successful than nonwhites. Blacks are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. In our state of Washington, a review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white offenders differently. Blacks committed crimes because of internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of external conditions such as family conflict.

With such prosecutorial power and the tendency toward bias against non-whites, it’s important to examine the prosecutor candidates’ records, views and awareness of systemic racial bias. Please vote with social justice in mind this November!

ERACISM Minute by Heidi Ohana--September 23, 2018

I want to talk about white fragility today.  I know someone comes up here each week and talks about racism in this country, within our denomination, and within ourselves.  I also know sometimes people get tired of it.  This is what white fragility is about. 

White people in this country live in an environment that protects and insulates us from race-based stress. This insulated environment builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering our ability to tolerate racial stress.  We don’t want to hear that we benefit from institutionalized racism, that we live in a white supremacist culture, or even that we, ourselves, hold some racist attitudes.  We’re good people after all.  We’re on the “right” side of this issue.  No one wants to feel bad about themselves – especially if they believe racism is wrong.  And that is not the goal.  The goal is to become increasingly aware of how we benefit from and participate in this system.

White fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive feelings.  Learning to tolerate this discomfort and continuing to listen and to learn and not be defensive will be how change happens.

Heidi Ohana