Jamil Smith | Vox

What does it mean to take America’s “jobs of last resort”?

2022-04-22T10:57:47-04:00

A sheriff’s deputy and on-site nurse give medications to an inmate at Las Colinas Women’s Detention Facility in Santee, California, in April 2020. Such jobs, says Eyal Press, author of “Dirty Work,” are often morally troubling, and the people who hold them the least advantaged. | Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images

Part of the Future of Work issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Harriet Krzykowski was a mental health aide in a South Florida correctional facility, making $12 per hour, when she learned of the death of Darren Rainey. Rainey was a mentally ill man who had been incarcerated at the prison where she worked, and prison guards had killed him.

The details were particularly horrifying. The guards responsible had trapped Rainey in a shower and tortured him with scalding water until he collapsed. The temperature had reached as high as 180 degrees. By the time of Rainey’s autopsy, he had burns on 90 percent of his body. Rainey’s skin, reportedly, would fall off if touched.

Krzykowski wanted to quit her job upon hearing of the 2012 incident. She couldn’t afford to. She was one of the many American workers whose stories journalist Eyal Press tells in his book, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, published late last summer. Press, whose feature reporting appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, shines light upon the lives of undocumented immigrants working on the kill floors of poultry slaughterhouses, Americans deputized to carry out drone warfare in their country’s name, and others, such as Krzykowski, who have been toiling in jobs that the most powerful castes pass on to the poorly educated and compensated. Those jobs often serve to empower the very system that maintains and exacerbates social and economic inequity — and robs workers of their dignity along the way.

I spoke with Press about the people who American society demands do the “dirty work” for others, and the complicity of us all in their plight. I also wanted to know his views on the recent labor victories won by Amazon and Starbucks employees, and how the state of work has been broken in the United States. Can we put it back together? Do we really want to?

A lightly edited transcript of our discussion follows; a more in-depth audio version will air in May as an episode of the Vox Conversations podcast.

Tell me just plain and simple: What is “dirty work”?

Well, “dirty work” in my book is a little different from the colloquial expression most people know. I think when most people hear that phrase, they think of an unpleasant job that is physically dirtying, like hauling the garbage off the streets. But here, “dirty work” refers to something different: unethical or morally troubling activities that society tacitly condones and depends upon, but generally doesn’t want to hear too much about.

You start off the book with a quotation from James Baldwin: “The powerless must do their own dirty work. The powerful have it done for them.” So, are we speaking here strictly in terms of what benefits the powerful, or are we talking also about folks who don’t necessarily want to do a particular thing that keeps society running?

Even though I don’t think [Baldwin] is referring to “dirty work” as I’m referring to it, he’s capturing there something that’s very basic. When you have to dirty your hands and you have a lot of power, you get someone else to do it for you, right? You have the luxury to kind of disassociate yourself from this kind of unpleasant activity.

And if you don’t have power, you often find yourself being the person who’s on the receiving end of that order to do the “dirty work.” When we think about America’s prison system, who runs that system? Who works in that system? I don’t just mean the guards. I also mean the mental health aides.

A lot of my book takes place in the mental health ward of a prison [and] America’s industrial slaughterhouses — the kill floors of those slaughterhouses.

That Baldwin quote sets us up for thinking about “dirty work” through the prism of power. It really is through that prism that my own exploration of it takes place.

You’ve spent years researching the lives and the work of these people who cannot afford to quit their jobs, despite the indignities that they’re suffering and witnessing. Tell me a little bit about who these people are.

Who they are is generally folks who take what I call jobs of last resort. They’re not society’s elites. They don’t have advanced degrees from places like Stanford and Harvard. They end up doing a job that is concentrated and geographically located in less advantaged parts of the country.

During the prison boom in this country, it’s no accident that so many prisons were built in more depressed rural areas of the country that had kind of seen their mills and factories go, and saw building a prison as a way to create jobs for the economy. But what ends up happening is the people who fill those jobs are the least advantaged.

And it’s not that they can’t leave the jobs. They often have very bad choices in front of them, so they feel compelled to stay for one reason or another.

You mentioned in your epilogue that inequality also shapes the geography of “dirty work” and who is held responsible for it. In terms of the jobs that you cover in this book, you’re talking not just about folks who work in slaughterhouses or in prisons, but also folks who are operating drone strikes. How does the inequity we experience in this country shape the geography? How does it determine where that “dirty work” is done?

Dirty Work opens with the story of a mentally ill incarcerated man in Florida named Darren Rainey, who is literally tortured to death. He’s locked in a scalding shower by a group of prison guards in a prison called the Dade Correctional Institution. It’s a horrible crime. Certainly the guards who were involved in that crime should be held accountable, but it’s notable that, as in the Abu Ghraib story, no one of higher rank was held accountable for Darren Rainey’s death.

In fact, a lot of people who were in high-ranking positions at that time got promoted or ended up benefiting. In fact, the governor of Florida at the time was Rick Scott. And as we know, Rick Scott is now a US senator from Florida.

One of the ways that inequality plays out in the story of dirty work in this country is that on the rare occasions when the curtain is pulled back and we see this dirty work going on, the blame goes to the lowest-ranking people at the bottom, and that’s very convenient for society, right? It’s like, “Oh yeah, there were these awful guards. Wow. They did this horrible thing.”

But why did this happen? Well, it happened because Florida, like so many states, has turned its prisons into its largest mental health institutions, right? Florida spends just about less than any other state. At the time of Rainey’s death, they had the third-largest prison system in the country. So where are the resources going? And what kind of institutional and structural arrangements have been made to, in effect, create the conditions so that abuses like the ones I describe — both with Darren Rainey as the victim and many other people as the victim — these abuses are not surprising. These abuses are predictable. And it’s the folks at the bottom who we can conveniently blame, but who are part of a much larger system of dirty work that I think all of us are to some extent accountable for.

It’s easy, I think, for some people to disengage, saying, “Well, there’s no changing the system.” And also they’ve been shown only “the good things” that the system can do for them. And thus, we’re not worried as a society about the people who you describe as these cogs in the suppressive system. And folks who, as you note, could be considered enablers or accomplices — but are actually more like captives. Could you describe what you’re trying to get at?

To go back to the prison example, I talked about the Dade Correctional Institution and the mental health ward there. I look at and I interview the mental health aides who worked there and someone could certainly say they were complicit in what happened to Darren Rainey. Why?

Because they knew what was going on. They knew that the guards at Dade were having fun, some of them were deliberately abusing mentally ill incarcerated men in this facility and getting away with it. You have a Hippocratic oath, right? You have a duty to report.

On the other hand, as I say in the book, these were mostly women who were working, who I interviewed. Working in the mental health ward, and their own security, just going to work every day and running group sessions and getting from one wing of the prison into another wing, they were beholden to the security guards at this institution to make them feel they could do their jobs safely without being threatened, without being left alone in the rec yard as one of the mental health aides was, and she was nearly assaulted.

What they quickly learned, these mental health aides, is that if you challenge the guards in any way, they would retaliate. Harriet Krzykowski raises some questions about what the guards are doing because they’re not letting the guys out into the yard on Sundays. The response to that is that she’s suddenly left alone in the yard.

I’m particularly haunted by a conversation I had with a woman named Lovita Richardson who worked at Dade, the same prison where guards killed Rainey. When she took the job that day, she really was idealistic about it. She thought she could help people who society had kind of considered beyond the pale, thrown away, stand up for these folks’ rights. She really believed in what she was doing, and she gets the job and not long after she starts working there, she sees a group of guards pummel an incarcerated man who is tied to a chair, and she is in terrible shock and distress.

When she told me the story years later, tears filled her eyes as she’s talking about this. She wanted to report it and she wanted to get the story out, but another woman who worked there told her, “Listen, Lovita. You can’t. You can’t say anything about this. You’re just going to be retaliated against,” and so she didn’t say anything. It’s those kinds of dilemmas that the folks who do the dirty work in our society face, and it’s the rest of society that should think about those dilemmas, because we are not disconnected from this work.

What you describe happening to Lovita is a reminder of what you call “moral injuries” throughout the book. How would you define those, and what are some other examples of that being, I guess you could say, injury to insult within this context?

That’s a central idea in my book: that inequality isn’t just about who earns a huge paycheck and grotesquely large bonuses that go out to folks on Wall Street. That’s the material side of inequality, but there’s also a moral dimension to inequality.

It’s these hidden wounds that folks like Lovita sustain doing society’s dirty work, doing jobs that are not only demeaning, but that puts you in ethical situations where if you stand by what you believe and you say something, you may lose your job. If you’re not in a position where you can find an easy replacement for that job, what are you going to do?

How exactly do you think that the drive toward unionization at places like Amazon and Starbucks will help those who are stuck in these “dirty” jobs? Will labor bargain some of that dirtiness away, or just make sure that people are paid more for compromising their dignity or morals?

The most important basic fact that’s implicit in your question is that these things can be altered. I can’t say whether the poultry industry that I wrote about will experience a wave of unionization that really empowers the folks like the ones I wrote about who felt so exploited and abused. I don’t know. What I can say is that it would certainly make a difference if that happened. In fact, in the section of the book on the industrial slaughterhouses, I talk about how we’ve kind of come full circle, because back 100 years ago was the days of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. And there, again, it was an immigrant workforce that was brutally exploited and the conditions shocked and appalled those who witnessed them and read about them.

Things changed in the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s in meat packing. Why did they change? Well, there were powerful unions; in particular, a union that actually was progressive not just in empowering workers, but in integrating the union membership and making sure that Black and white workers in the plants saw each other as fighting for a common cause. That raised wages, it improved conditions. But then it reverted back when the industry responded by relocating plants outside of cities like Chicago, going, again, far afield to these rural areas and recruiting an immigrant workforce that they could exploit more easily. And going with what some of the scholars of this industry call a low-wage strategy: Bring the wages down, bust up the unions, and bring it back, in a sense, to Upton Sinclair’s Jungle.

That actually makes me think of a different book. There’s a quote at the end of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The title character and narrator says, “Who knows, but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” How do we restore the vision of those who just refuse to see other people, many of whom are maintaining the institutions that those powerful people rely upon?

Dirty work is intentionally placed behind the scenes of social life. That’s a phrase that I take from a social theorist named Norbert Elias. He wrote this big book called The Civilizing Process. And it sounds really nice, “the civilizing process.” It’s this thing where it’s actually a book about morals and manners and how, over time, things that we consider unpleasant, like blowing your nose at the table, you don’t do that. You do that in private. He talks about carving an animal, that’s done in the kitchen. It’s not done at the table. You’re reading this book and thinking, “Oh, this is a story of progress.” But it’s not a story of progress because what Elias is arguing in that book is that the civilizing process is about pushing these, what he calls disturbing events, behind the scenes of social life. We push them out of sight, in a sense.

To get back to your question, I think that that is very fundamental to dirty work in our society. It’s there, but we don’t actually see it. How often do you actually see what goes on on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse? How often do we see the footage of a drone strike? How often do we see inside the mental health ward of a prison? We don’t very often. We know it’s there, it’s not that it’s a mystery to us, but it’s abstract. There’s such a big difference between the abstract and the particular and the concrete.

I’ve been reading Clint Smith’s book [How the Word Is Passed], a tour of the American landscape and slave plantations. He starts with Jefferson and at one point he meets these two women. They kind of know Monticello was a plantation, and they know that Jefferson owned slaves, but it’s abstract and it’s not particular. That difference between the abstract and the particular is enormous.

What is the opposite of dirty work? When I saw the title, I’m thinking, there’s any number of ways you can describe this, and I’m not just talking about the Steely Dan song. I’m talking about how white-collar workers do what we might regard to be dirty work, just in a different sense.

It’s funny, because when I was telling some friends that I was writing this book, and they didn’t know anything about it, they were like, “You mean corporate lobbyists? You mean Wall Street? People who sell those shady Wall Street products that destroyed the whole global economy?” I had to laugh, because I was thinking —

Big Oil, keep going.

Exactly. I don’t, in any way, deny that some of the highest paying, most powerful jobs in American life, in American society, are deeply unethical and extremely profitable. We can think of the Sackler family, described in Patrick Radden Keefe’s great book. This is the real “dirty work,” you could argue, but there is a big difference. I’m interested in work that feels dirtying and stigmatizing and sullying and demeaning for the people who do it.

If we think about bankers, even after the great financial meltdown in 2008 that caused so much suffering, and so many people lost their livelihoods and there was so much pain in so many communities. Yet when Obama dares to criticize Wall Street, there’s immediate pushback. There’s indignation and outrage that he dares to do this. To me, that indignation reflects the power that these industries have. Not just the financial power, but the social and cultural power.

That is not something that the folks I write about in this book have. Generally speaking, they don’t have platforms. They don’t get to tell the New York Times the president should not be talking about our industry that way. How dare he? They don’t get to spend all this money influencing how they are seen and perceived by society. Fundamentally, when we think about things like stigma, moral injury, and shame, we have to think about them as a function of power, and who has it and who doesn’t in our society.

I’m trying to think about how we fix this. Part of the solution will probably have to be political. I’m thinking about what President Biden did just this past January, issuing an executive order declaring that 70,000 federal workers were going to immediately start earning $15 per hour, and that 300,000 employees of federal contractors were going to see a raise to $15 per hour reflected in their paychecks over the course of the year. One of the things he brought up was dignity. It’s not just about a paycheck. I’m wondering how you think embracing dignity in the workplace might help get us further toward labor equity, or will it have that much of an effect at all?

Biden has made a point of talking about labor as something more than just a paycheck. It is about you, your place in the community, it is about dignity. It is about your pride, or it should be, in a society that values work. In terms of fixing, there’s not a lot in my book on solutions; partly, that’s because I’m not a policy expert. I can’t claim to deliver a set of proposals that could be translated into policy that will change this. And also because, I actually think that dirty work doesn’t just grow out of policy. It grows out of culture.

That’s another reason I didn’t go into the solution side of it too much, because I feel like the real solution is a transformation of who we are. If we think about mass incarceration, to really change this immense system of cruelty and punishment, we have to change who we are. We have to change what we’re willing to be. Are we there? I don’t know.

I don’t think we’re even close. I look at what you’re saying, and to me, accountability is the death of American exceptionalism. If we actually take account of all of these various horrors that, through this country’s gestational period, it sought to hide from itself, and we got used to that, like an infant getting used to a particular environment. We got used to being this type of America, and no matter the technological advances or the cultural evolutions, it’s maintained that same character, where we can view ourselves as great as long as we hide the bad stuff.

That may feel good in the short term, but it doesn’t stop work from becoming broken in this country, as it has been. Specifically with regard to dirty work, though, is this a fixable problem if we don’t get that cultural revolution? And if not wholly, are there any particular parts that we should be targeting?

The little bit of hope that I took from the examples I chose is, on the one hand, I felt they’re incredibly entrenched, like mass incarceration. These are incredibly entrenched parts of American life. On the other hand, there are also aspects of our social world where there has been a critical mass of people who have risen in the last decade or two to say, “We cannot continue this.” To me, it’s not that dirty work is immutable, that you can’t change it. But change is hard, and change is slow.

Jamil Smith is a senior correspondent for Vox.

Stanley Nelson’s 3 decades of telling Black stories

2022-03-23T14:58:05-04:00

Documentary director Stanley Nelson received his first Academy Award nomination for Attica, chronicling the infamous New York state prison rebellion. | Corey Nickols

I was a teenager when I watched Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, and I had no idea what Al Pacino was yelling about outside that bank. “Attica! Attica!” made me curious, but there was nothing about it in my high school textbooks and not that much in the library. I’d have to wait many years to understand more about the largest and deadliest prison insurrection in United States history.

Amidst a conservative crusade to criminalize the teaching of that history, there may not have been a better time for documentarian Stanley Nelson’s Attica to emerge.

During much of the three decades Nelson has spent making films, he has told stories about Black life in America. His films have shed new light on everything from the 1921 Tulsa pogrom to the fight for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, with films such as Freedom Summer and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. Now, the 70-year-old documentarian has received his first Academy Award nomination for his feature-length look at one of the most pivotal events in the history of American criminal punishment.

Co-directed by fellow nominee Traci A. Curry (a friend and former colleague of mine), the documentary begins with the inception of the rebellion — an explosion of the frustration building up in the men imprisoned at Attica Correctional Facility. The persistently poor treatment they were receiving ranged from insufficient medical care to a lack of showers and toilet paper. The disrespect and dehumanization by the all-white roster of guards may have been at the top of the list. The prison’s population has a heavy majority of Black or brown men so, as one interviewee asked sardonically early in the film, “What could go wrong?”

One answer to that question came on September 13, 1971, five days after the standoff began. State police retook the prison, using gunfire. Thirty of the 33 incarcerated men who died that week were killed by law enforcement. Though a cover story emerged that alleged the prisoners were responsible for all 10 deaths of Attica prison guards during the insurrection, medical examiners quickly determined that authorities killed nine of them.

As the film details, authorities also hunted down many of the insurrection’s leaders. The captive insurrectionists who survived were held at gunpoint in the open yard. They had been stripped completely naked and lined up. The image evokes captives huddled together in the hull of a slaver’s ship, or placed in line before being auctioned off like cattle. Dehumanization of the prisoners by authorities sparked the insurrection, and their punishment was an even more accelerated version of it.

It’s perhaps the film’s most striking image, and it’s where I wanted to start my conversation with Nelson. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve always believed nothing is truly comparable to chattel slavery except chattel slavery. But those images of the incarcerated men, those who survived, standing and sitting naked out in the yard…

Had you seen that before?

I just saw it for the first time making the film. My reaction was: Oh, shit. Wait a minute. Are these pictures real?

One of the strange things is that so many times, the footage acquires its real power from the way it’s edited in the film. When you see [the naked men] in context and people talking about that they were made to strip all their clothes off and just sit there with their hands on their head, stark naked. Then those pictures gain even more power.

This is your first Oscar nomination after directing more than 25 films, and I know you’ve produced many more. What does this particular recognition mean to you? I know there are other accolades — you won the DGA (award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary) — but an Oscar nomination … what does that mean to you?

Well, the Oscar was always the biggest. It’s just so special. I remember, as a kid, watching the Oscars with my mother and just being fascinated by all the gowns, the movie stars, that whole thing. It’s just really huge.

Just being nominated draws so much more attention to Attica and so many more people will see it. The Oscar nomination is like a stamp of approval. It’s really big for me personally, but it’s even bigger ’cause it means more people will now see the film.

Also, it isn’t as if one necessarily has to see it in the theater. People can pull it up on Showtime and YouTube. There’s more accessibility to the material you’re putting out there.

The accessibility of my films and all films has changed the industry, especially for documentaries. People who might not go to the movies to see a documentary call one up at any time and see it. They can say, “Hey, honey, we’re tired of watching people swing on webs — let’s try a doc.” And without costing them any money. They can watch the first five or 10 minutes and see if they wanna proceed.

I’d like to talk more about how the film begins, with the very first moments of the rebellion — including the violence done to (and care for) William Quinn, the only guard who died from injuries caused by the men incarcerated at the prison. And it tells us about the poor treatment that inspired the insurrection.

Having done a number of historical films, one of the hardest things to do is to tell what we call the backstory. Why did the prisoners rebel? What was happening in Attica? So many times, we kinda have to leave out that history because you gotta get to the story.

With Attica, we had this little historical segment that talked about the town of Attica, New York — and then [another in which] they talked about the mistreatment of the prisoners. We didn’t know where to put it. We actually tried to put the history unit first, and it was like, “I thought we were talking about a rebellion in the prison. Why are we talking about this town?”

Then we found this great piece where “L.D.” Barkley, one of the prisoners, is talking into the mic after the rebellion starts on the first day. And he says, well, you wanna know why we’re here? We’re here because of the mistreatment that we’ve been [subjected to] in the Attica prison. And it seemed the perfect way to go back in time. So we started the film, immediately, with the rebellion and that seemed to work. If the story of the rebellion was exciting enough that first day, you wouldn’t be sitting there wondering, “Well, why did they rebel?”

“Attica became really a symbol of the power that is [in] rebelling: The power that the prisoners had to rebel, and then the power that the state would take.”

You’re a New Yorker, and I’ve lived in New York before for many years. The Attica prison and the rebellion were things that you heard about, that you knew about. But there are folks who just have no frame of reference whatsoever.

I think one of the things that we had to do with this film is it had to play to everybody. So that there were people like yourself who knew the broad outlines of Attica or [just] some of the details. There are people who don’t know anything about Attica. I mean, I can’t tell you the number of people, when we say “Attica,” they’re like, “Oh, so what’s that? Is it a type of dog? Is it a place? Is it a thing?” We had to make the film make sense to everybody and also hold everybody’s attention.

Yeah. And that’s the thing: It’s tough to know necessarily what everybody would want or need. Do you feel like there has been a change in how your films, including this one, are received as time has passed?

In a way, I think that Attica definitely has been received in a different way than it would have, like three or four years ago. Because of George Floyd, because of the protests against the police, because we’ve seen — over and over and over again — the police violence against people of color. The door is cracked open a little bit for people.

The people who are interviewed in Attica are all so incredibly convincing — from the prisoners to the news people, to the hostage families, to the observers, to the National Guard. You don’t doubt for one second that anything they tell you is the truth.

I’m interested in what you knew of the truth before. Can you describe what Attica signified to you and to other Black people in New York City well before the rebellion, particularly before the massacre happened?

I was 20 years old when Attica happened. I was old enough to remember it. It was like a thriller story: the prisoners had taken over this prison, what’s gonna happen? What’s gonna happen through five days? And then finally, devastating that it ended with such incredible violence that nobody thought it would end in. Nobody thought that they would just go in with guns blazing and kill [nearly] 40 people.

So, I think that for so many people, especially in New York, Attica came to symbolize the power law enforcement [has] and the willingness to use that power to put down any kind of rebellion in the most violent way. Attica became really a symbol of the power that is [in] rebelling: The power that the prisoners had to rebel, and then the power that the state would take, and the violence that the state was perpetrating on people who rebelled against it. Because there’s probably no one more powerless than prisoners in a penitentiary.

“We didn’t know anything about Attica. It was an upstate prison, 250 miles from New York City.”

We didn’t know anything about Attica. It was an upstate prison, 250 miles from New York City. Unless you were involved in the prison system or you had a loved one in the prison system, nobody talked about it or thought about it.

I mean, that’s what prisons are made to do. That’s one reason why prisons are in the middle of nowhere. We don’t have to see it day-to-day and we don’t have to think about the prisoners and that’s what prisons are set up to do. So we don’t have to think about the prisoners and the fact that we’re incarcerating more than 2 million people. We don’t have to think about it.

What did you learn about the rebellion and the massacre during the process of filmmaking?

I learned, one, why the rebellion started. We never really understood why the rebellion started, how cruel and unusual the punishment was. Why they felt that they had to rebel. The vast majority of people never quite understood the ins and outs of why [New York Gov. Nelson] Rockefeller ordered them to go in and use deadly force. We learned that in the film, through interviews that we did. The phone calls [with President Nixon], which are just really shocking.

I knew about the incident, but I didn’t realize the political consequences for Rockefeller’s career that stemmed from that. I knew him as the vice president under President Ford. I had actually not really understood how this incident really helped embolden his power.

Propel him to go to be vice president, yeah.

You’ve spent a great deal of your career, Stanley, telling various stories about Black experiences. Profiles of people such as Madam C.J. Walker, Marcus Garvey, and the Freedom Riders. You’ve looked at tragedies like Tulsa, as well. How has making these films changed how you personally look at America, if at all?

I think that one of the things it’s done for me is it’s helped me to understand that — that America’s like a roller coaster ride, you know?

[laughs]

Sometimes up and sometimes down, on this back up and there’s down again. And a lot of times we, especially, as African Americans, wanna look at the idea of “up from slavery.” Slavery was the worst, and now, it’s upward progression into the light. But it is really a roller coaster ride. There’s times when [it’s] at the top and there’s times when it goes down to the bottom. But it stays at the top much longer as long as we push. That’s not only African Americans, but [all] people of color. As long as we push for change, at least we’ve got a chance.

As the documentary makes clear early on, the physical structure of Attica aided the insurrection in the first place. How did you make decisions about the film’s structure, the graphics that you use, archival footage, to illustrate points such as that most effectively?

You as an audience had to be aware of the physical structure of the prison. That you had to be aware of where you were in time. And then, we could really concentrate on the kind of roller coaster ride, which was every day, of Attica.

You had to understand that they were trapped in one yard in the prison and that there were guys with guns on the walls, trained down at them, for five days. And that the only thing that held [those guns] off was the fact that they had hostages.

And you needed to understand that every day was different. And so, we have a very simple five-day structure to most of the film. The exhilaration of the first day. The despair of the fourth and, then, the morning of the fifth day. We really wanted to have a framework so that you could understand that much easier.

How did all the technical expertise that you’ve acquired over the course of your career help audiences to comprehend a story like this in full?

We made the film during the time of Covid. So many of the archives were closed down and we just had to wait and keep calling. Find people’s home phone numbers, sometimes to call at home and see what we get. [We had] to be tenacious.

We made a couple decisions early. I made a number of films in the last few years without narration, and we thought that we could make this one without it. I think it kind of makes the audience see the film in a very different way. So we don’t have anybody, like the “voice of God,” telling you what to think.

We had thought that we would need historians to talk about it. We actually filmed one historian and cut together a couple of scenes, and he was great. But we realized that we didn’t need them. We would let the story all be told by people who were there.

And we realized early that we just wanted the music to kind of be a wind at the back of the story. We didn’t want the music to take over. That was really complicated because we had to really cut back on the drama, on how loud the music was. The story’s just so amazingly dramatic in and of itself, and we didn’t wanna send it overboard.

“Unless you were involved in the prison system or you had a loved one in the prison system, nobody talked about it or thought about it”

Some of the logistical challenges you alluded to with Covid, I mean … I’ve spent a lot of time digging through archival footage during my career. How much do you enjoy that particular part of the filmmaking process, if at all? ’Cause I know so many people don’t get to see that.

I love watching old film. Finding archival material and looking at old pictures. And I never knew that [before]. It wasn’t like I went into filmmaking, and made a bunch of historical films ’cause I was like, “Oh, I love looking at old films and seeing old pictures.” But I just really do. I love it. I love looking for the details.

Think [about] when the helicopters come in on the final day. They fly over and they’re gonna go into the prison. There’s a shot of the families outside and these three or four women, and they all look up.

I mean, it’s just as if you were directing a feature film. All those kinds of great things that just happened. There’s a woman with her head bowed and then the camera pans down and she’s praying, Her hands are together and she’s praying. It’s just like, “Oh, shit!” [laughs] “This is great stuff.”

It’s a matter of really loving the footage. And we really had to mine it and look at it over again.

I understand exactly what you mean. I was astonished by some of the stuff that you were able to find. I mean, the footage of the incarcerated men rolling out the injured guard, William Quinn, on a stretcher. I’m thinking, “Who was even filming at this point?”

That’s the shot. When I saw the first rough cut, when I saw that shot, I thought, “Now we’re in the prison. Let’s keep you there.” We’ve got something that’s special. It’s recognizing those shots.

Putting together a film is like putting together a puzzle without a picture of what it looks like when it’s completed, right? You just gotta figure out how it fits.

I would do jigsaw puzzles with my daughter. There’s a whole line of puzzles that are hand-cut, that don’t have a picture. They’re supposed to be impossible. You have no guide.

“We’re not gonna teach about the enslavement of African Americans because it makes somebody uncomfortable?”

Talking about pictures, I’m reminded of the first image we talked about, of the naked prisoners held in the yard after the insurrection. It slaps everyone across the face.

What kind of urgency is there for you as time moves on to tell such stories while you can? And if so, how does that—

I mean, am I gonna die soon?

No, no, no, no, no. [laughs] I don’t mean it like that.

I’m not sure if there is urgency. You know, I’m truly honored to be able to tell the stories that I’ve been able to tell. I think that it’s really exciting because you know, there’s any number of stories to tell about the African American experience.

Given that, what are your thoughts about the government determining which parts of the African American experience that students can or cannot learn in school? And what parts of history are considered palatable?

[laughs] I think that it’s unbelievable. We have to really be conscious of what’s happening. Ten years ago, you wouldn’t have believed it if somebody told you what was gonna happen and what’s happening. We’re not gonna teach about the enslavement of African Americans because it makes somebody uncomfortable?

I just think that it’s really, really destructive, and it boils down to the cliché: If you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat your mistakes. It’s an incredible step backward.

The case for a Black History Year

2022-02-28T11:10:14-05:00

A case displaying books for Black History Month at the Elmont Memorial Library in Elmont, New York, on January 29, 2021. | Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images

Of the nearly 240 students who currently attend Sprunica Elementary School, in Indiana’s rural Brown County, 97 percent are white. Recently, school counselor Benjamin White sent a letter to the parents of those students.

“February is a time for caring and growing for our students,” White’s letter begins. “In honor of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, I will be coming around and teaching lessons related to equity, caring, and understanding differences.” White didn’t make clear precisely what those lessons would be, but assured parents that having “a greater understanding of diversity” would benefit both the students and the school as a whole. White then gave them the choice of opting their kids out of it.

That created a big headache for the Brown County school superintendent, Emily Tracy, who later apologized for White’s “unauthorized” letter and wrote in a statement that “our District does not permit students to opt out of history lessons — including ones based on historical injustices.”

None of us should be able to select, a la carte, which parts of history students learn so as to guard our political or cultural sensibilities. However, the Sprunica Elementary story comes amid an ongoing public and political crusade by conservative politicians, voters, and media figures against the teaching of Black history, during this month and the 11 others.

The battle over what conservatives mislabel as “critical race theory” has been raging across the country since the summer of 2020, coming in the wake of the global uprising following George Floyd’s murder. The politically conservative rebuke to an all-too-brief uptick in interest about Black lives and antiracism has been a campaign aimed at deleting Blackness from the national story.

This imagined peril has a purpose. Rather than using the power of their offices to actually govern and fight systemic racism, Republicans have been trying to gaslight people into believing these problems don’t exist. The result has been a clumsy, though dangerous, attempt to absolve America of its history of racism and discrimination by preventing people from actually learning about them. This has had significant consequences, including the reported intimidation of students, educators, and elected officials.

The misguided crusade has only proved how much America needs the very thing that Black History Month founder Carter G. Woodson wanted: to fully integrate, year-round, the teaching of Black history into the curriculums of our schools.

Critical race theory is not the scourge of public education or threat to the self-esteem of white schoolchildren that Republicans and their media appendages depict. It is a scholarly framework for understanding the systematic nature of American racism, and few students outside of graduate school engage with it. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in the seminal 2001 volume Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, define it as “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”

Bowing to the demands of Republicans hunting critical race theory and those parents frightened by anything that doesn’t promote race-blindness and American exceptionalism, school districts and libraries are removing texts like the 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist — as well as several others simply written by Black authors. Entire topics are disappearing from our economy of ideas. Efforts are underway to make Black history, LGBTQ+ life, and the Holocaust off-limits subjects. Some states are trying, and succeeding, in their quest to make such nonsense the law of the land.

Florida Republicans have passed Senate Bill 148, otherwise known as the “Stop WOKE Act” (the acronym is short for “wrongs to our kids and employees,” though the “our” is not made specific). It would mandate a certain unconsciousness in the state’s public schools were it to become law, banning the teaching of critical race theory and lessons about gender identity.

Florida is hardly alone: Education Week reported this month that, to date, 41 of 50 states have taken steps, including introducing legislation, to restrict public schools from teaching critical race theory. Meanwhile, Chalkbeat reports efforts are underway in 17 of 50 states to “expand education on racism, bias, the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to U.S. history, or related topics.” Still, exploiting white fear in this way has been so effective that Democrats, who regularly count education as a political strength, are on the defensive against the literal promotion of ignorance. What else should we call it when people are trying to keep others from learning things?

As the fight to criminalize the sharing of knowledge continues, it’s worth remembering that Black History Month was explicitly about two things from the very beginning: education about Black history, and honoring two key figures in that history.

Frederick Douglass didn’t know precisely on which day in 1818 he was born, but he believed it to be in February. Eventually, he celebrated his birthday on February 14, coincidentally, two days after Abraham Lincoln’s. Combining existing Black celebrations of the two men’s birthdays, the late scholar and historian Carter G. Woodson originated Negro History Week in February 1926. It only became Black History Month in 1970, 20 years after his death.

For this reason and others, historians and other scholars have referred to Woodson as the “father of Black history.” It is an odd title, perhaps, but consider the climate in which he founded Negro History Week. When recalling the America of 1926, it’s evident that Woodson was pivotal in rescuing that history from the pyre of America’s racist revisionism.

The Great Migration was well underway, in part because racist massacres in places like Elaine, Arkansas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, were still fresh in Black people’s minds. They knew America had become all too used to the spectacle of their deaths; postcards and other horrifying souvenirs from the lynchings of African Americans had become commonplace. Much like today, the country’s greatest terroristic menace came from within, perpetrated by white people with extremist beliefs.

However, Jim Crow was not merely a systematic method of segregation, legalized discrimination, and violent terrorism. Its principal business, using both murder and monuments, was erasure. Its proponents achieved this by killing Black people, yes, but also by lauding the supposed heroism of Confederates who enslaved their ancestors. By 1926, construction of statues and monuments promoting the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy had become epidemic.

Woodson — the second Black Harvard PhD ever and the only child of formerly enslaved Americans to earn one — noted that campaign of erasure upon Negro History Week’s inception, and expressed the hope that the observance would give rise to the further inclusion of Black people within the nation’s narrative:

If a race has no history, it has no worth-while tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated… In such a millennium the achievements of the Negro properly set forth will crown him as a factor in early human progress and a maker of civilization…

Must we let this generation continue ignorant of these eloquent facts?

Over the generations since, however, that is precisely what has happened. Public and private education about Black history and achievements has been insufficient, at best, even before the manufactured panic Republicans are stoking. Woodson’s observance, explicitly intended to integrate the teaching of Black history inside school classrooms, has become more of a marketing ploy for consumer brands and a virtue-signaling opportunity for political leaders.

Black History Month was not meant simply to make us feel less racist or more culturally aware; it was designed to show us what America really is and always has been, so that we might make it better. To a power structure that reinforces and metastasizes racial inequity, one Black History Month is not a threat.

How about 12, though? That is what Woodson sought, after all.

The idea of a “Negro History Year” sounds so much like what Republicans seem to be anxious about that I’m a bit surprised they haven’t used it in a fear-mongering speech or advertisement.

Yet Woodson spoke consistently of his hope for exactly that. He imagined a day in which “the Negro is studied so thoroughly that special exercises are no longer exceptional,” he said in 1940. “There is a growing demand for workbooks and syllabi with which to facilitate the study of the Negro and thus make Negro History Week [into] Negro History Year.”

He also wrote, in a separate article, that his Negro History Week was not merely about increasing instruction, but fostering ambition. “[It] should be a demonstration of what has been done in the study of the Negro during the year and at the same time as a demonstration of greater things to be accomplished,” adding that “a subject which receives attention one week out of the thirty-six will not mean much to anyone.”

Many, including activist and columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, have seconded Woodson in the following years. Amid this crusade to erase and erode Black history, ambition, and accomplishments, let me echo them once more.

Twenty-eight days of concentrated learning, even if done properly and not merely through Instagram memes, would hardly be commensurate with the manifold Black contributions to the American project. Nothing less than a full integration of those lessons into school curricula was ever going to be sufficient.

I recall, as one of very few Black students at a private school, being handed a thick, black textbook in seventh-grade history class. It had a bald eagle on the cover, and about one page detailing the entirety of the civil rights movement. I recall Martin Luther King Jr. getting one of the few, if only, mentions. You’d have thought he was the only civil rights leader who existed.

Black History Year isn’t such a radical idea when you consider that neither I nor my parents were offered the opportunity for me to opt out of learning the history of white people in America. It is still palpable, that perception of my difference or uniqueness I felt during my earliest days at school. I had to learn early, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, how to move through the world as a Black boy in a white world. Those skills have served me well later in life, admittedly. But they were lessons I had to learn.

That fact of life isn’t changing anytime soon. Black folks will need to stay fluent in whiteness, so to speak. Mostly in order to survive, at the very least. But why are white people exempt from returning the favor? How is our nation’s survival not dependent upon them becoming fluent in the experiences of Black people, as well as Indigenous populations, Asian Americans, the disabled and chronically ill, and other marginalized communities?

One could argue that white people haven’t had to consider their whiteness unless there is a perceived hazard to the inherent, unearned societal advantages that they too often enjoy. The increased conspicuousness of their racial category in a slowly diversifying America may be a cause for the conservative panic.

As some further their campaign of disinformation, there is a clear motivation to solidify a younger voting base before they mature, calcifying their ignorance about racial matters so that they do not think critically about the America that is evolving around them. If there is an ongoing identity crisis with white Americans, which seems to be the case, it’s arguable that a more inclusive education about race and inequity would give them the vocabulary to have conversations rather than avoiding them.

How do we best combat the current efforts to prohibit and mischaracterize the teaching of true American history? A good place to start is Woodson’s own vision: integrated curriculums concerning race, racism, and this nation’s history.

Would implementing and expanding Woodson’s vision even work? The very least we can do is find out. The development of empathy through knowledge, curiosity, and scholarship is an underused weapon against prejudice and discrimination. Woodson not only understood this, he taught us as much. I had to read about him in books that my teachers failed to assign me. I discovered Woodson in libraries, and through texts gifted or handed down to me from relatives. And yes, every February, I got reminders of Woodson’s contributions.

It isn’t terribly radical to consider that all American schoolchildren should learn the very history Woodson sought to save. And not just in February.

Ahmaud Arbery’s killers convicted on federal hate crimes charges

2022-02-22T13:00:41-05:00

Attorney Benjamin Crump, center, holds up the arms of Ahmaud Arbery’s parents, Wanda Cooper-Jones, left, and Marcus Arbery, right, outside the federal courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia, on February 22, as the three men convicted of murder in Ahmaud Arbery’s fatal shooting have been found guilty of federal hate crimes. | Lewis M. Levine/AP

Twenty-five-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was Black, unarmed, and out for a run in a Georgia neighborhood near where he lived when three white men chased him down, and accosted, assaulted, and shot him dead nearly two years ago. Whether that all happened because the victim was Black, well, that’s something a lot of people feel they already know.

The effects of racism are often more visible than racist intent. Perhaps that is one reason the prosecutors dodged the topic of racial motives almost entirely in the state murder trial of Travis McMichael, now 36; his father, Gregory, 66; and William “Roddie” Bryan, 52 — the men who carried out what has been labeled a modern-day lynching in broad daylight. Each was convicted in November of an array of charges related to Arbery’s fatal shooting that day, including malice murder, felony murder, and false imprisonment. In January, all received life sentences in Georgia state prison, with the McMichaels having no chance at parole.

On Tuesday, a jury also convicted the men of hate crimes and other charges in a separate, second federal trial brought by the Department of Justice. Federal prosecutors argued that the men were driven to kill Arbery because of “a fatal dose of racial resentment and racial anger.” The jury — reportedly consisting of three Black people, eight white people, and one Hispanic person — agreed.

The conviction is significant for many reasons, in particular that it recognizes the role of race in the attack and killing of the unarmed young Black jogger and all but ensures the defendants will serve additional prison time. The prosecution and verdict also comes on the heels of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent efforts to combat hate crimes, which have spiked during the pandemic.

The difference between the Georgia murder trial and the federal hate crimes trial mattered, particularly since neither race nor racism was raised as a factor by the prosecution in the murder trial, save for a mention in district attorney Linda Dunikoski’s closing statement. Howard Law School professor Justin Hansford said that amounted to a “whitewashing of this trial,” telling Vox after the verdict that the tactic played to those afraid to talk about race.

The federal hate crimes charges made such avoidance impossible.

If the murderers have already been convicted, why was there another trial?

Federal hate crime prosecutions, for those victimized, can offer not only a promise of additional punishment for offenders but also an acknowledgment of the role bigotry played in a crime. That can be a powerful thing.

The defendants are also all pursuing appeals of the life sentences they received in their Georgia trial. (While many states have their own hate crime laws, Georgia did not have one at the time of Arbery’s death.) If they are successful, whatever federal sentences they will now receive would not be redundant.

The trial almost didn’t happen: Federal prosecutors initially thought they’d sealed a plea deal for two of the defendants, the McMichaels, to avoid having to try the hate crimes case at all.

The terms of the deal would have required both of the McMichaels to plead guilty to one charge of the government’s multi-count indictment: the part alleging that it was “because of Arbery’s race and color” that they interfered with Arbery’s right to enjoy the use of the public road on which he was jogging.

Then, late last month, US District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood took the rare step of refusing the plea deal struck by the US Department of Justice. Because that proposed deal collapsed, so did their admissions of guilt.

According to the Associated Press, Wood rejected the government’s plea deal because it locked her into adding 30 years of prison time (atop the McMichaels’ existing life-without-parole sentences), and she felt that Arbery’s family should have a say at the sentencing.

Arbery’s family, who had previously objected to any plea deal being struck, disagreed with a provision allowing Travis McMichael to transfer immediately from state prison to federal custody — where, they argued, conditions wouldn’t be as tough for him or his father, were he to join him. “Please listen to me,” Wanda Cooper-Jones, who is Arbery’s mother, told the judge, per AP. “Granting these men their preferred choice of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face.”

The two-week federal trial did shine a light on race. Federal prosecutors presented reams of evidence, including racist text messages and social media posts, in their attempts to show that racism was a motivating factor for the men when they chased down Arbery and shot him. One text sent by Travis McMichael months before Arbery’s killing stated, “We used to walk around committing hate crimes all day.”

What did “justice” really look like in this case?

That hate crime prosecutions are uncommon, and became even rarer during the Trump administration, matters.

The Justice Department data is somewhat surprising. There were 647 “hate crime matters,” as they were termed, investigated by US attorneys’ offices between 2005 and 2009. Fewer reports — 597 — were investigated between 2015 and 2019, marking a decrease of 8 percent. In total, however, of nearly 1,900 suspects investigated between 2005 and 2019, 82 percent were not prosecuted. The overwhelming majority of those cases were not pursued for lack of evidence.

However, 85 percent of defendants convicted of a hate crime were sentenced to prison, with an average term of more than 7.5 years.

Convicted in their federal trial, Bryan and the McMichaels are likely looking at considerably more time than 7.5 years; it could explain their willingness earlier to plead guilty to committing crimes against Arbery because he was Black in exchange for 30 years’ imprisonment.

The federal conviction of the McMichaels and Bryan may seem like a strong indicator of the viability of hate crime laws to administer criminal punishment and accountability. It sounds like a reason to argue that the system works.

Scott Hechinger, a former public defender, had a different perspective. “To me, the trials underscore how ill-equipped the criminal legal system, process, and punishment is to achieve accountability and healing,” said Hechinger, who is now the executive director of Zealous, a national advocacy and education initiative that uses media and the arts to combat systemic injustice. “Ahmaud Arbery’s killers were sentenced to life without the possibility of ever being released. Sentenced to death in prison. Yet still, his killers remain unrepentant and indignant. Meanwhile, even worse: Arbery’s family remains unwhole, unhealed, traumatized.

“I hope that this second trial, which may result in a verdict that their crimes were actually motivated by racial animus, brings some closure to the family,” Hechinger said before the trial began this month. “I fear that it won’t. I fear that the worst possible outcome may be new expansion and harsher application of federal criminal laws and sentences that we know from experience, always disproportionately get enforced against Black and brown people and people of lower socioeconomic statuses.”

A guilty verdict and additional prison time may help give the Arbery family some peace, and that is significant. The more central question of this federal trial, amid continuing debates about the effectiveness of hate crime laws, is whether such laws have a deterring effect on racist violence. (Research suggests they don’t.)

The challenges of proving racism inside a courtroom

What is a hate crime prosecution supposed to prove? And who is it even protecting?

Bryan Adamson, a professor of the First Amendment and civil rights at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, noted that a second trial can be necessary when the deprivation of someone’s civil rights results in death. The men in this case were convicted of hate crimes charges as well as kidnapping charges; the McMichaels also faced and were convicted on charges of using a firearm in the crime.

Adamson told Vox that federal prosecutors had a much different hill to climb than their counterparts in the state’s trial. However, the burden of proof is, in a sense, was also on the defense this time around.

“Prosecutors are going to have to demonstrate, by direct or by circumstantial evidence, that the defendants were motivated by the race of Ahmaud. That brings in some nuances and issues regarding proving motivation, which can be a challenge,” Adamson said before the trial began. “The prosecution has to put it front and center, but the defense then has to attempt to present a case that shows that there was anything else but race that motivated them to do what they did.”

Bryan and the McMichaels claimed in state court that they were attempting a citizen’s arrest for a series of alleged burglaries for which they suspected Arbery, though they had no evidence. They argued their encounter was legal based on a Georgia code, since repealed, that dated back to 1863 — a law that “was basically a catching-fleeing-slave law,” Cornell University criminal law expert Joseph Margulies told NPR in October. Even the excuse that the men hoped would absolve them was stained by racism.

Adamson believed before trial that the defendants may try recycling elements of that failed criminal defense: They have argued that they were concerned about the crime in their neighborhood and the safety of property in the area. Many of the defense’s efforts leading up to the hate crimes trial were directed toward keeping evidence out of the case — including testimony from Bryan that Travis McMichael uttered a racial slur after fatally shooting Arbery, as well as racially offensive texts allegedly sent from Bryan’s phone. The texts ultimately were presented to the jury.

Update, February 22, 2022: This story has been updated to reflect the February 22 conviction of the defendants on federal hate crimes charges.

The NFL had the Brian Flores lawsuit coming

2022-02-11T18:21:20-05:00

Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores looks on during a 2019 game against the New England Patriots. His recent lawsuit against the NFL and three teams alleges that “the NFL remains rife with racism.” | Adam Glanzman/Getty Images

The Houston Texans announced this week that Lovie Smith would be their new head coach. Fifteen years ago, he became the first Black head coach (by a matter of hours) to win a berth in the Super Bowl. Now he’ll be the first Black man to lead three different NFL franchises on the sidelines.

It’s good to see Smith, the team’s defensive coordinator last season, get another shot to lead an NFL team after coaching the Chicago Bears and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Texans’ hire of Smith, however, cannot make up for the damning allegations in a recent lawsuit filed against the NFL and three of its teams: Black head coaches in the NFL are neither hired at representative rates nor kept around for very long.

In the 58-page lawsuit filed this month, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores, who is Black, alleged that “the NFL remains rife with racism, particularly when it comes to the hiring and retention of Black Head Coaches, Coordinators and General Managers.” Flores — who was fired by the Dolphins in January, despite a record-winning three seasons — also claims that he was subjected to what he called “sham” interviews for head coach positions by both the New York Giants this offseason and the Denver Broncos in 2019. Flores says the interviews were only meant to satisfy the league’s quota for interviewing candidates of color before the teams ultimately hired white men.

His former team stands accused of multiple offenses throughout the suit, including this breathtaking allegation: During Flores’s first season as coach, “Miami’s owner, Stephen Ross, told Mr. Flores that he would pay him $100,000 for every loss, and the team’s General Manager, Chris Grier, told Mr. Flores that ‘Steve’ was ‘mad’ that Mr. Flores’ success in winning games that year was ‘compromising [the team’s] draft position.’

If an NFL inquiry finds the allegation credible, Ross and Grier will be shown to have been awfully cavalier with the career of a young Black coach in a league that already has trouble hiring them. Imagine Flores, in his 30s and in his first year with the Dolphins, put in such a position by his wealthy, white employer. It would be unconscionable.

Both the Giants and former Broncos general manager John Elway have denied that Flores received anything but a fair shot at the job, and the NFL responded that Flores’s lawsuit was “without merit.” In a statement, Ross wrote that the allegations against him were “false, malicious and defamatory.”

Flores’s lawsuit, which was timed to coincide with Black History Month, has, however, once again gotten the most powerful American sports league enmeshed in the National Conversation About Race.

The moment echoes not only the coaching controversies of the past but also the culture war over Colin Kaepernick and the sideline protests he began as an NFL quarterback in 2016 to draw attention to police violence and other forms of racial injustice against African Americans. Racism is a topic that continues to make the league nothing but uncomfortable, and heading into Super Bowl LVI in Los Angeles on Sunday, in the midst of a new controversy is probably the last place the NFL wants to be.

On Wednesday, outside SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, where Super Bowl LVI will kick off on Sunday, that’s exactly where NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell found himself. “We won’t tolerate racism,” he said when pressed by reporters during his annual “state of the league” news conference. “We won’t tolerate discrimination. If there are policies that we need to modify, we’re going to do that.” He offered no further details and did not specifically address Flores’s lawsuit.

Whether the lawsuit proves in a court of law that racism exists within the NFL’s hiring practices may be irrelevant in the end. The solution is right there, and it’s been there all along: Fix the problem. Just hire more Black head coaches.

The NFL just can’t seem to do it with any kind of regularity, to the point where it represents actual, sustained progress.

Richard Lapchick and the organization he runs, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, compile data on diversity in the NFL each year. The institute gave the league a B+ overall in its 2021 report for its racial hiring practices, for everything from coaching staff to C-suite executives to professional staff at the league office and within its member clubs.

Good news, until you get to this line, from Lapchick: “Unfortunately, the NFL began the regular season with only five coaches of color (15.6 percent). This is still lower than any other league in terms of racial hiring of head coaches or team managers. It is far short when comparing the 2021 season to the record of eight coaches of color who began the regular season in 2018.”

Only two people who identify as Black or multiracial have been hired for the nine NFL head coach vacancies that have been available since the regular season ended a month ago: Smith in Houston, and San Francisco 49ers offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel in Miami.

With the additions of Smith and McDaniel, the NFL is back to five — and back to that low bar.

Both NFL coaching and media attract plenty of Black talent, so the problem isn’t availability of qualified candidates. The coordinator of the league’s best defense this past season and the men who ran the offense and defense of the last Super Bowl champion are all Black, and all went without being hired. Leslie Frazier, Byron Leftwich, and Todd Bowles are just three examples.

The league also has in place the Rooney Rule, named for the late Pittsburgh Steelers owner and league diversity committee chair Dan Rooney, mandating that every team with a head coaching vacancy interview one or more “diverse candidates” before making a new hire — “diverse” being one of the coded terms the league is still using for “nonwhite.”

Seven years after the inception of the Rooney Rule, the league expanded it to include general manager jobs and equivalent front-office positions, requiring each team to interview at least two Black, Indigenous, Asian, and/or Hispanic or Latino candidates who currently worked outside of their organization.

Other incentives have been added, such as draft pick rewards for teams who see their staffers hired to head coach and general manager positions via Rooney Rule interviews. (One example: After Cleveland Browns vice president of football operations Kwesi Adofo-Mensah left the team to become the new Vikings general manager this offseason, the NFL announced that the Browns will receive a third-round selection in both the upcoming 2022 and 2023 NFL drafts.) Nonetheless, Black coaches have shared their frustrations that there remains no path to advancement, and that “sham interviews and racial discrimination are part of the NFL hiring process,” NFL Media’s Jim Trotter wrote this week.

None of this, however, has been incentive enough to get NFL teams to actually hire Black head coaches. No amount of statistics, no mandated number of interviews with candidates of color, nor any promise of draft picks have been enough to get the NFL to hire Black candidates at anywhere near a percentage that’s in accordance with that of Black players on team rosters (nearly 58 percent).

In any discipline, including coaching, it is more difficult to visualize a goal that you cannot see. Limiting the number of Black head coaches is putting a ceiling on aspirations. That is one of the most insidious effects of systemic racism, whether or not that was the intent.

Acknowledging the lack of Black leadership in the league and addressing it head on didn’t have to be this difficult for the NFL. Jason Wright, president of the newly minted Washington Commanders, spelled it out last week in a speech before the Economic Club of Washington, DC. Wright, one of two Black NFL team presidents, made the solution plain: “If ownership is fully committed to diversity and inclusion, change can happen very rapidly.”

More casually put: When it comes to the discussion about hiring Black coaches, there’s nothing to it but to do it.

In a perhaps not-too-surprising twist, Flores was in the running for the head coach job that ultimately went to Lovie Smith.

In response to the news that the role would go to Smith, Flores’s attorneys, Douglas H. Wigdor and John Elefterakis, lauded the hiring but noted their concerns that Flores was passed over possibly because of his stance against discrimination in the league.

“Mr. Flores’ goal in bringing his case is to provide real opportunities for Black and minority candidates to be considered for coaching and executive positions within the NFL,” their statement read. “However, we would be remiss not to mention that Mr. Flores was one of three finalists for the Texans’ head coach position and, after a great interview and mutual interest, it is obvious that the only reason Mr. Flores was not selected was [because of] his decision to stand up against racial inequality across the NFL.”

Texans general manager Nick Caserio has said Flores’s lawsuit “really didn’t affect our process at all.”

The Washington Commanders’ Ron Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, is the only non-Black NFL coach who has spoken up in Flores’s defense. “This is a very accomplished coach,” Rivera told ESPN shortly after the lawsuit was filed. “I can see the frustration and I can feel the frustration. It’s almost as if this is your last resort. How does a guy like that get left out of the hiring cycle?”

“If you put his résumé — and took the name off and changed the team he coached for and grew up with — and put it on the table and looked at all the résumés, Brian Flores is the type of résumé you point at. Let’s judge on merit.”

If this were about meritocracy, though, Kaepernick would still be a quarterback. Flores would still be the Dolphins’ head coach. After the team suddenly canned Flores in January, following a season-ending win against Bill Belichick’s playoff-bound New England Patriots, Miami Herald sports writer Greg Cote called the firing, “Unjustified. Unfair. Shocking. Egregiously premature. Embarrassing. Irresponsible. Dumbfounding.”

What the Flores lawsuit exposes, once again, is that the NFL’s 32 teams could hire more Black head coaches if they wanted to. But despite all the requirements and incentives and qualified candidates, they don’t. The players may be mostly Black, and that is fine. The labor force can look one way, but leadership can’t.

Flores was arguably the best coaching candidate available, and still is. To that point, what is the smartest thing the NFL’s teams could do to begin addressing the valid concerns Flores spotlights in his lawsuit?

Hire Black coaches. And hire Brian Flores.

The father of environmental justice, on whether we’re all doomed

2021-12-10T14:40:00-05:00

Robert Bullard, pictured here in Washington, DC, in 2013, received the John Muir award from the Sierra Club in 2014 for his contributions to the field of environmentalism. | Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Robert Bullard has been trying to explain to us for more than 40 years that the word “racism” isn’t so easily defined. Long before the water crises we see in cities like Flint, Michigan, the Texas Southern University professor was warning that racism can show up in our environment, especially if we have a certain zip code or skin color.

No one had coined the term “environmental racism” in 1979, when Bullard’s wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, brought a lawsuit against Southwestern Waste Management for planning to put a municipal landfill in a Houston neighborhood where 82 percent of the residents were Black. It was the first litigation in United States history charging a corporation with racial discrimination in its environmental practices.

That legal action led to a groundbreaking study, “Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community” — and it also began a crusade Robert Bullard continues today at the historically Black Texas Southern and as a member of the Biden White House’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Born in Alabama in the ’40s, during Jim Crow, Bullard has seen bigotry and discrimination in many incarnations that fit with the uglier and often outright violent signifiers we’ve all been taught to easily identify. Things such as a Klan hood, segregated buses, a noose, or racial slurs. Ever since publishing the textbook Dumping in Dixie in 1990, the first of his 18 books, he’s been teaching students and many others that racism can show up in dirty water, lead poisoning, and polluted air.

The man known by many as the “father of environmental justice” went to Scotland last month to attend and take part in COP26, the United Nations conference on climate change. I couldn’t wait to have Bullard on the show to hear about what he saw there, and how the world sees his domestic struggle against environmental racism as part of our global struggle to keep this world habitable for humanity.

Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. Of course, you’ll find much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jamil Smith

So first things first, Dr. Bullard, what is “environmental justice”? It’s a term that I feel like people might understand instinctively, but as the father of environmental justice, I figure it’d be good to have you explain it.

Robert Bullard

Well, environmental justice embraces the principle that all people in communities are entitled to equal protection of our environmental laws; housing, transportation, energy, food, and water security and health laws. Environmental justice is nothing more than this whole principle: people have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment without regard to race, color, national origin. It’s just that simple.

Jamil Smith

Indeed. It’s been 30 years since you all convened at the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. Can you tell me a little bit about October 27, 1991, and the principles that you all discussed there?

Robert Bullard

[It] was a historic moment. Dr. Benjamin Chavis was the director of the Commission for Racial Justice at the United Church of Christ. Here is a Black civil rights organization based in the church, a white denomination [that] called together a group of us that had been working on different issues around the country and said the environmental movement mainstream somehow is leaving out, leaving behind, and not addressing our issues — and that we need to plan a conference, a summit for ourselves.

It took us a year to plan it. We raised the money and it was a four-day summit. And we said that the first two days of this summit must only be people of color. Why? It’s because people of color in this United States, people of color, Indigenous people, we have suffered the indignities of and oppression of slavery, of genocide, of imperialism, colonialism. And so African Americans, native and Indigenous people, Latinos, Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Islanders, in 1991, we didn’t know that much about each other. And so we had to get together, just ourselves, in a room and try to unpack all of that baggage of those -isms that basically created mistrust and misunderstanding.

And after we had those very painful, but enlightening two days, then we said, we have to bring everybody in. We gotta bring the white folks in, because we do not wanna be an exclusionary movement. So, over those four days we had meetings, we had sessions, we had seminars, we had trainings. We developed those 17 principles of environmental justice.

And the overarching theme of the principles is that people most impacted by environmental challenges must speak for themselves and must be in the room when decisions are being made. And that we must develop the kinds of research, the kinds of empowerment tools, so that we can speak for ourselves and not allow others to go to Washington or go wherever and speak for us.

When we got to Rio de Janeiro at the Earth Summit in June of 1991, those principles had been translated into at least a dozen languages. Our principles of environmental justice may have been developed in the US, but they traveled well. Twenty years later in Johannesburg, there were thousands of us from all over the world representing our movement that was not a US movement, but was a global movement.

Jamil Smith

One of these 17 principles that actually drew my eye in some conversations I’ve had recently with some friends is number six. You talk about environmental justice demands, the cessation of production of all toxins, hazardous waste, and radioactive materials. We think about the climate change, okay, this is the beginning of how it addresses the local concerns that people don’t necessarily associate with the climate fight. Things like lead paint, things like garbage being dumped disproportionately in neighborhoods of color. How have you, over the last 30 years, gotten people to better recognize that this is part of being an environmentalist as well?

Robert Bullard

If you look at principle six, it’s talking about the production of dangerous chemicals and waste. If you look at transboundary waste trade, where companies that produce all kinds of chemicals — not just US companies, but companies around the world — those waste products generally get shipped to where? They don’t get shipped to Europe. They get shipped to developing countries [in] Africa and Asia.

If you talk about the whole issue of production of materials for war, at the beginning of that process, you talk about radioactive waste or uranium being mined in Indian lands, and violating sovereignty, poisoning people. Then it’s made into bombs, nuclear weapons that are not just here, you talk about the global threat. That principle involves the threat to humanity, whether it is talking about war, or the production of chemicals, or the production of the kinds of pollution that creates a problem.

There’s another principle that talks about self-determination. That’s another principle that if you look at domestically, you can see that we are talking about sovereignty. We’re talking about: people have the right of self-determination and not somehow being predetermined what you will be, what your community will be, that you deserve not to be dumped on, whether it is poison, pollution, whether it’s the greenhouse gases that’s creating flooding and more, in terms of sea level rise; that self-determination principle may have started out as a domestic counterprinciple. When you blow it up, you’re talking international, you’re talking treaty rights. You’re talking country-to-country kinds of things. Those principles, as they got pushed out, people around the world started to see that those principles were easily translatable and informed the climate principles that came later.

Jamil Smith

It’s sort of like blues’ influence.

Robert Bullard

There you go.

Jamil Smith

I get it (laughs).

Robert Bullard

(laughs) There you go.

Jamil Smith

I want to get back to you: how you [became] this passionate, even still, about these particular issues. What was your upbringing like? What inspired you to get involved, not just in terms of conservation, but also this more specific fight later?

Robert Bullard

I grew up in Alabama, and the issues when I was coming of age were civil rights and justice. And you could see justice in almost every issue, whether it was housing; you grew up in segregated neighborhoods where the street pavement stops at your neighborhood and you got dirt roads, you don’t have sewer lines, you don’t have water hookups, and you don’t have street lights. And you can see at your segregated school, your libraries at your school, you can’t go to the main library because it’s white. You can’t go to the swimming pool because it’s white.

So, seeing the segregation of life in the South and not realizing that, later on, I would be involved in a study in a lawsuit that would challenge that separateness, understanding that America is segregated and so was pollution. I didn’t realize it growing up. I know everything was segregated, including when you’re born and even when you die and go to the cemetery, you go to a separate cemetery. But later on, if you look at the work that I was doing, teaching students and teaching another generation to make that connection between where you live and how long you live, and [how] what’s in your neighborhood can make you healthy and what’s in your neighborhood can make you sick, and how the good stuff gets somehow onto the west side of town and all of the nasty stuff gets somehow sent to the east side. Locally, “unwanted land use” is just another nice way that planners call all garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, highways, and other things, [but in] the built environment we call infrastructure, all infrastructure is not created equal.

And all of my writings, all of my books, all of my research will use that equity lens to look at most of the things that make communities unhealthy or somehow create less livability and less resilience. Now, that was a discovery that was unintended. I did not start out to do this. It was something that was, kind of like accidental environmentalists, if you can think of a term like that (laughs).

Jamil Smith

(laughs) You know, it makes a lot of sense. I know you grew up in Alabama, and actually you graduated in 1964, the same year as my dad from high school. And so, first of all, I just wanted to contextualize that for our listeners who didn’t understand, maybe, that you grew up in the Jim Crow South.

How did that upbringing then lead to academia? I want to understand exactly why you finally felt like that was the path to you making the biggest difference.

Robert Bullard

In all of my readings, one of my heroes was W. E. B. Du Bois. He was a sociologist, an excellent professor and teacher — but also a heck of a political analyst. And so I graduated from college and I knew I always wanted to be a college professor.

I have four siblings. It’s five of us. Four out of five are teachers. And I wanted to be a college professor because, you know… I thought it was cool to be a college professor. And so I went to Atlanta University [now Clark Atlanta University] for my master’s degree — and then I went to Iowa State University and finished my PhD. I wanted to model my career after one of my heroes. W. E. B. Du Bois developed the sociology department at Atlanta University. Du Bois did all of his research in Atlanta. Even though he could have gone anywhere, he did it at an HBCU.

My career has been modeled after someone who would write and work with community groups, Du Bois helped found the NAACP. He was not just a bookworm and a professor. He was also a political activist.

Robert Bullard

And so that’s where I am. I write. I like to research. I like to work with communities and assist and support. I don’t pretend to lead anybody, but if communities come to me and want me to assist and support, if I can, I will assist and support and get other allies and students to assist and support, because that’s what our movement is built on; powering local communities to speak for themselves and getting them the tools and training so that they can combat the forces that are arrayed to kill them. This is a toxin. And let’s not, you know, fancy it up and put a ribbon around it. Environmental challenges that many of our communities face, including climate challenges, are made worse by racial redlining that occurred 100 years ago, when Black communities were not provided flood protection, were not provided the kinds of trees and green space and landscaping and design. In the 2020s, those same areas that were redlined are hotter because there are no trees, green canopy. They’re more prone to floods. They have more pollution, and they have more Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.

You talk about what has happened over these years because of systemic racism and planners and policy and financing. That’s how we have to use our science, use our research, use our data to combat that. If we’re just going on strict emotion and we want people to be mad, angry, but we have to have other tools in our toolbox to combat that. And that’s how our environmental justice movement has been able to create more individuals that are practitioners that can do this work.

Jamil Smith

One of those tools, of course, is the legal system. Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management — can you tell me a little bit more about what was so important about that lawsuit?

Robert Bullard

Bean was the first lawsuit to challenge environmental racism using civil rights law. And the legal theory behind Bean was that placing landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps in Black communities was a form of discrimination because you were denying Black people equal protection under the law. And the emphasis was on using civil rights as the tool to say, “No, this is illegal, and therefore you can’t do it.” So, I was asked to do the study.

But understand that that lawsuit was filed in 1979, and the case went to court in 1985. The case was lost, but the loss of the case was not the end of the story. The significance of that is that even when you may lose a lawsuit, you gain the knowledge that this is a justice cause and a justice issue, and you pursue the next line of offense. Having a solid legal theory and a solid research methodology could point the direction to other kinds of legal arguments and research.

Dumping in Dixie came out of Houston, expanding the Houston case study to the whole South and looking at landfills, incinerators, petrochemical plants, refineries, where you found the same pattern that was found in Houston, and then expanding it from the South through the United States. And then expanding from the United States to look at, globally, which communities and nations around the world have basically received the worst impacts of our environmental policies, global industrial policies, global extraction policies, etc.

All of that sprang from Houston, from that one case and that one study. Eighteen books that connect the dots, with transportation, disaster response, energy security, food and water security, issues around health housing.

These things connect in a way that we can really see it today. But 42 years ago, people would laugh at you and say, “Well, there’s no such thing as environmental racism. And there’s no thing as environmental injustice.” I got nasty letters from publishers, you know, back in 1989, when I had the manuscript.

Jamil Smith

What kind of letters?

Robert Bullard

You know, they were saying, “No, you can’t use that. There’s no such thing as that.”

Jamil Smith

So you have a new idea and they couldn’t allow that because they hadn’t heard about it before?

Robert Bullard

Eventually, the book got published in 1990 as Dumping in Dixie, and it got adopted as a textbook. You know, it was the only book on environmental justice for two years. And it kind of took off. This book was written in a way that challenged mainstream environmentalism. It challenged the environmental groups in terms of not working on these issues, getting all the money, but not dealing with real issues on the ground in many communities. It was threatening in a way that was not my intent.

But the idea that here you have some organizations that had been around since the 1890s and had never dealt with these issues, and very smart people — but we know very smart people don’t know everything. It took a while for some of our environmental friends to understand or grasp. At our people of color summit, we invited five leaders of environmental groups. Two came. The other three said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about.” (laughs).

Jamil Smith

(laughs) My goodness gracious.

Robert Bullard

We’ve made progress since then, you know. In 30 years, we’ve made progress. But there’s still a lack of understanding of these issues.

The ironic spectacle of Kyle Rittenhouse’s Tucker Carlson interview

2021-11-23T18:30:23-05:00

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted last week in the shooting deaths of two men during racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in summer 2020. | Sean Krajacic/Getty Images

Ever since Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and injured a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during racial justice demonstrations last year, legions of conservatives and far-right extremists have celebrated an 18-year-old as both a hero and a victim. Soon after receiving a “not guilty” verdict last Friday, Rittenhouse attempted to take part in his own beatification.

Adopting a posture both confrontational to his critics and satiating for his most ardent supporters, Rittenhouse appeared in his first national television interview on Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Tonight after a Wisconsin jury acquitted him on all charges in the August 2020 shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and injury of Gaige Grosskreutz. Even as Carlson’s interview aired during primetime, protests over the verdict that began over the weekend continued in major cities.

The interview came as Rittenhouse’s trial and subsequent verdict has stirred up fierce debate on some of the nation’s most contentious issues, including gun rights and the right to protest without threat of violence. However, the court proceedings were often deeply unserious, starting with Judge Bruce Schroeder declaring that the attorneys in the case were not allowed to refer to Rittenhouse’s victims as “victims.” The defendant himself actually helped randomly select the jury, using an unusual, old-fashioned lottery-style draw. And lest we forget, there was a day of dubitable sobbing on the witness stand.

Contrary to that weepy court testimony, Rittenhouse mostly spoke with a calm voice as he swung at Carlson’s softballs. The host did his utmost to center Rittenhouse’s trauma and pain, teeing him up to lash out at President Joe Biden and invoke incorporeal forces like a “mob mentality” that he blamed for his legal plight.

His guest also said that he supported Black Lives Matter and that those committing violence during the demonstrations following Jacob Blake’s shooting by Kenosha police were “opportunist, taking advantage of the BLM movement.”

It was odd to hear Rittenhouse say that, particularly in the middle of a Fox News interview. Stating one’s social-justice bona fides serves, for white liberals, to signify allyship. But for conservatives or people playing to that audience’s sympathies, doing so is often a move to seek cover from charges of racism. The resurgence of extremist, white supremacist violence, and intimidation during the last several years has been, in their view, an act of self-defense.

How, then, in that context, are we to take it when we see Rittenhouse argue to Carlson, “It wasn’t Kyle Rittenhouse on trial in Wisconsin; it was the right of self-defense on trial”? When the same people who support Rittenhouse believe the country needs defending from people who aren’t white and don’t believe in defending Black lives, he can say he supports Black Lives Matter all he wants.

What’s evident, no matter Rittenhouse’s intent, is that he came to the right show on the right network.

True to his program’s formula, Carlson’s hour was devoted to stoking misguided cultural grievances on Rittenhouse’s behalf. Known for its reckless demagoguery and fabulism, Tucker Carlson Tonight regularly focuses on convincing his heavily white audience that they’re right to fear a society supposedly out to get them (and only them). Throughout the broadcast, the host promoted a forthcoming documentary about Rittenhouse’s trial, despite the ongoing controversy about his revisionist January 6 special.

Acquittal, in the Fox News arena, became absolution. “What a sweet boy,” Carlson remarked about the 18-year-old before a commercial break.

It was the seventh anniversary of the day that an actual boy, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, was mistaken for a man by Cleveland police before an officer shot him dead. But on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Rittenhouse was supposedly the victim this November 22, and the host gave him every chance to deny the most injurious claim his detractors have made. No, not that he is a murderer — that he is a bigot.

“I’m not a racist person,” Rittenhouse said, adding that he felt his case was not about race. (The victims in the case were all white, but prosecutors noted earlier this year that Rittenhouse had been photographed with Proud Boys and flashing a hand sign known as a symbol for “white power.” ) Whether this is about race is not Rittenhouse’s decision, though, and whether he is in fact racist seems irrelevant. He likely won’t dissuade his critics in the press and elsewhere who have labeled him a white supremacist, nor the self-identifying neo-Nazis celebrating his acquittal. More interesting, however, was how Rittenhouse described being affected by his time spent within American jurisprudence.

Rittenhouse had already twice stated his support for the Black Lives Matter movement (which strongly rebuked him in a tweet about the interview) when he took note of the inequities and degradation he experienced while in jail.

“I believe there needs to be change,” Rittenhouse said, “I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct — not just in my case, but in other cases. And it’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of somebody. If they did this to me, imagine what they could have done to a person of color who doesn’t maybe have the resources I do or isn’t widely publicized, like my case.”

Rittenhouse spoke of a jail cell he likened to “a one-star hotel,” where he had a mobile phone and tablet, but allegedly no running water. He didn’t shower for nearly a month, he told Carlson. Though he complained of being pepper-sprayed in Kenosha, Rittenhouse spoke glowingly of law enforcement — even thanking the guards at his first jail and praising their professionalism. But he also detailed how he spent more than 80 days in jail due to a problem too many defendants have: incompetent counsel. His allies at the time included QAnon conspiracy theorist Lin Wood; Rittenhouse alleged Wood exploited his case after Wood sought to claw back money raised for Rittenhouse’s bail. But some defendants are far unluckier, and some end up on death row.

Carlson reacted to these details as if he was shocked to hear such things could happen in America, as if a man named Julius Jones professing his innocence in Oklahoma had not narrowly escaped lethal injection the day before Rittenhouse’s verdict. Carlson’s only reference to the man whose shooting prompted the Kenosha protests where Rittenhouse fired on the three men was a baseless claim that “the media lies about the shooting of Jacob Blake.”

Still, almost by accident, Carlson’s program reinforced that there are many things wrong with the American project. They could have done an hour on Monday night reexamining Rice’s death and the family’s campaign to have his killing reconsidered for prosecution by the Department of Justice. Such a show might have made the same or similar points, but it’s foolish to expect Carlson, known for his openly racist appeals to white grievances, to recognize what’s wrong with America without peering through the lens of victimhood.

If only Carlson and Rittenhouse were able to discuss the terrible state of American jurisprudence without putting themselves in the spotlight. For all of Rittenhouse’s recognition of America’s faulty system of criminal punishment, the two still failed to acknowledge that it was the AR-15-style rifle he wielded that instigated the intimidation and harassment. Had they, the ridiculous spectacle on Fox News might have come close to having some worth.

Oklahoma will not execute Julius Jones, but the outcome should still trouble you

2021-11-18T16:36:06-05:00

Supporters of Julius Jones, who has been on death row in Oklahoma since 1999, marched to the parole board offices in Oklahoma City on February 25, where they presented a petition with over 6.2 million signatures calling for Jones’s sentence to be commuted. | Sue Ogrocki/AP

In a dramatic, eleventh-hour move, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) on Thursday granted clemency to Julius Jones mere hours before Jones was scheduled to be executed for the 1999 murder and carjacking of businessman Paul Howell. Jones, 41, had spent nearly 20 years on death row professing his innocence. Following a crush of national attention as athletes, activists, celebrities, and even fellow Republican lawmakers appealed loudly on Jones’s behalf, Stitt reduced Jones’s sentence to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

“After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones’ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” the governor said in a statement released by his office.

In short: Stitt spared Jones’s life, but wants him incarcerated for the duration of it. That represents a different sort of death sentence. It also signals an incomplete victory for both sides of this case: Jones’s advocates are happy he’s alive, but lament his inability to now argue for release; Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor condemned the decision, saying in a statement that he is “greatly disappointed that after 22 years, four appeals, including the review of 13 appellate judges, the work of the investigators, prosecutors, jurors, and the trial judge have been set aside.”

The commutation was also only a partial acceptance of the recommendation earlier this month from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board that Jones be granted clemency and have the chance to be eligible for immediate parole. Members of the board cited doubts about the evidence in the case, which has been controversial from the start.

Jones has always maintained his innocence, arguing that he was not even present at the scene of the killing and that his defense made a number of mistakes. The late Oklahoma County prosecutor “Cowboy” Bob Macy, who first brought the case against Jones, had a sordid record that’s been the subject of much scrutiny from academics, the press, and a 2018 ABC documentary about the Jones case, The Last Defense.

Alarm over Jones’s planned execution had been mounting in part because officials on the state’s parole board have publicly questioned the state’s lethal injection process. One official said Wednesday about another case, “I don’t think that any humane society ought to be executing people that way until we figure out how to do it right.”

Stitt’s statement did not mention the controversies surrounding Oklahoma’s lethal injections or the fate of a slate of incarcerated individuals who remain scheduled to be executed.

Oklahoma, one of 27 states with the death penalty, has been among those with the highest number of executions since the US Supreme Court reaffirmed the legality of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. After Oklahoma’s lethal injection drug protocols caused two grisly deaths and a last-minute pharmaceutical error was found before the execution of a man whose guilt was in doubt, a six-year moratorium on executions in the state was instated in 2015.

State prosecutors had pledged to continue the moratorium at least until a federal trial next year examined the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s execution practices. But the state recently began plowing ahead with the planned executions of several people in coming months, including Jones. The last man who died by lethal injection in Oklahoma, John Marion Grant, convulsed and vomited for several minutes following the administration of a sedative on October 28 — only heightening concerns about lethal injection practices.

No matter where the governor or anyone else stands on the question of capital punishment as a practice, questions about the drugs the state is continuing to use should have us asking: Does Oklahoma have any business executing people right now?

From the start, Julius Jones has said he didn’t do it

On July 28, 1999, businessman Paul Howell was shot to death outside his parents’ home in the predominantly white city of Edmond, Oklahoma, in front of his two young children. Howell’s GMC Suburban then went missing.

Julius Jones, a 19-year-old engineering student at the University of Oklahoma at the time of the killing, has maintained he is innocent since his arrest three days after the shooting. “As God is my witness, I was not involved in any way in the crimes that led to Howell being shot and killed,” Jones wrote in his clemency report. “I have spent the past 20 years on death row for a crime I did not commit, did not witness and was not at.”

Outspoken celebrity advocates for Jones over the years have included Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield, who has advocated for Jones for years. He choked back tears this week when speaking about the case. Mayfield, who won a Heisman Trophy at the University of Oklahoma, told the press he’s “been trying to get the facts stated and the truth to be told for a while.”

Calls for mercy for Jones this week came from millions of online petitioners. Joining Mayfield in his advocacy for Jones were NBA players Trae Young, Blake Griffin, Russell Westbrook, and Buddy Hield, all of whom have Oklahoma ties. Along with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, they wrote letters to Stitt pleading for commutation. Other celebrities such as reality star and legal-system reform advocate Kim Kardashian used their platforms to bring attention to Jones’s plight.

So did five Republicans in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Those lawmakers — Kevin McDugle, Garry Mize, Logan Phillips, Preston Stinson, and John Talley — released a joint statement last week asking Stitt to accept the parole board’s recommendation.

The Black Wall Street Times reported that former Trump White House communications official Mercedes Schlapp, along with her husband Matt, had been advocating for the same. “We are pleading, praying for the governor of Oklahoma to make the right decision,” Schlapp said last week.

There are many reasons Jones should be spared, his advocates have argued. Jones and his family have said that Jones was home that night, playing Monopoly with them and eating “spaghetti and cornbread.” That alibi wasn’t presented in court by his defense, which the family claims was incompetent. Prosecutors have said this is a “blatant falsehood,” and that Jones’s trial attorney never called the family to the witness stand because Jones repeatedly told his attorneys that he was not at home on the night of the murder.

The Innocence Project has called for Jones to be completely exonerated, arguing that there is “little doubt that racism was at play in Mr. Jones’s case.” Represent Justice, the nonprofit organization operating the site Justice For Julius, says the Jones family has claimed there was racial bias within the courtroom and racist intimidation from law enforcement — including an arresting officer and a juror who both allegedly directed the n-word at Jones.

The most significant allegation from the Jones camp is that they believe someone else committed the murder — someone who may have already admitted to it.

Trial transcripts show that witnesses identified Jones as the shooter and placed him within Howell’s stolen SUV. Howell’s daughter, Rachel — a young child sitting in the car when her father was shot — has also continued to insist that Jones was the killer. Jones, however, has said that Christopher Jordan, his former associate and co-defendant, committed the killing and later set him up by planting the murder weapon and a red bandana seen at the crime scene in the attic space above Jones’s bedroom. That’s where investigators found them both, and the bandana had Jones’s DNA on it.

It may also be incumbent upon the state to reexamine the evidence in Jones’s case solely because of the record of “Cowboy” Bob Macy, who first charged Jones with the crime in 1999. He secured at least 54 death sentences — more than any other individual prosecutor in the United States. However, courts have reversed nearly half of those sentences, and at least three of the people Macy sent to death row were later exonerated.

Macy claimed he was protecting the innocent. In 2001, he told the New York Times of the death penalty, “I feel like it makes my city, county and state a safer place for innocent people to live. And that’s why I embrace it, not because I get any enjoyment out of it.” According to a 2016 study by Harvard’s Fair Punishment Project, Macy once told a jury that sentencing a defendant to death was a “patriotic duty.”

That same Harvard study concluded that Macy engaged in “extreme prosecutorial misconduct,” including findings of inappropriate behavior in 18 of his cases. At least three of his capital convictions have been overturned. Many of his convictions relied on the testimony of police forensic scientist Joyce Gilchrist, who the FBI and Oklahoma Attorney General’s office later discovered had falsified evidence.

Even with the governor’s granting of clemency to Jones on Thursday, an urgent question remaining concerns the exceptional brutality of Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocols.

Oklahoma’s history of horrific executions

Before Clayton Lockett was executed by the state in 2014 for a murder conviction, his stepmother, LaDonna Hollins, wanted to know how it was going to happen. She said to reporters at the time, “I want to know, what mixture of drugs are you going to use now? Is this instant? Is this going to cause horrible pain?”

The sedative midazolam was administered to Lockett first, followed by a paralytic called vecuronium bromide. Then came potassium chloride, which was supposed to stop Lockett’s heart. His death, however, was not instantaneous. It took 40 agonizing minutes for Lockett to die.

Lockett woke up and tried to rise from his chair, even after he was declared unconscious with all three drugs in his system. Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton said at the time that Lockett’s vein failed, allowing the drugs to leak out into his system. The lethal injections hadn’t brought about the relatively silent death expected from such procedures. Lockett’s botched execution resulted in him dying of a heart attack.

Charles Warner, sentenced to death after he was convicted of killing an infant, stayed still in his seat after he received his injections in 2015, but his last words were “My body is on fire.” That same year, the state came within moments of killing Richard Glossip before prison officials discovered they had received the wrong injections from their supplier. The state knew this before the execution, yet the governor’s general counsel still said that stopping Glossip’s execution “would look bad for the state of Oklahoma.”

Then all executions halted in the state for six years, until John Marion Grant was put to death in October. The 60-year-old, sentenced in 1999 for the murder of prison cafeteria worker Gay Carter, began convulsing and vomiting following the midazolam injection, per the Associated Press, something observers said was unusual. One doctor characterized the dose Grant was given as “insane.” The state insisted that it carried out the execution “in accordance with Oklahoma Department of Corrections’ protocols and without complication.”

The latter part of that sentence — “without complication” — is surely in doubt. Oklahoma’s track record is giving authorities in the state, including some on the state parole board, pause as they consider the state’s unchanged drug protocol. Its constitutionality is still in question.

In a statement, Gov. Stitt’s office said that a 2016 election referendum had the effect of “constitutionalizing” the state’s death penalty. The governor’s office, citing the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center, argued that the referendum prevents state courts from declaring the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment or a violation of any provision of the state constitution.

Oklahoma moved forward last month with executing Grant, the first to die by lethal injection in the state since 2015, after the US Supreme Court voted 5-3 to lift temporary stays on his execution and that of another man: Julius Jones.

What comes next?

Even with Stitt’s announcement Thursday that he had granted Jones clemency, there is another thing to reevaluate: Oklahoma’s methods for killing its incarcerated defendants on death row. Including Thursday’s proclamation, Stitt has not given any recent public statements indicating he’ll do so.

The sparing of Jones’s life brings relief to his supporters, but not satisfaction. For every other person who remains on Oklahoma’s death row, the same specter still looms: the violent, potentially unconstitutional manner in which the state intends to bring about their deaths.

Soul food and the stories it tells about America

2024-05-01T11:03:50-04:00

Four-year-old Hugh Howard digs into some Thanksgiving soul food with his dad, Aber Howard, at the fifth annual Soul Food Dinner at Elliot Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1999. | Joey McLeister/Star Tribune via Getty Images

What can we learn about our history, and ourselves, just by taking a bite?

You often hear me say on the Vox Conversations podcast or read in my writing how I believe identity is in everything. Nowhere is this more evident than with food. We associate our favorite cuisines with the people who originally cooked them. Ethnicities and nationalities are a part of our daily vocabularies because of what we eat.

Because food and identity are intertwined — in this nation and every other nation — things inevitably get complicated. It’s about to be Thanksgiving, one of the most widely celebrated American holidays, and one whose commonly told origin story is a Eurocentric fairy tale. It’s uncomfortable to think about war and genocide as you bite into your grandmother’s sweet potato pie, or as you savor that salty, smoky skin falling off your turkey drumstick. Just as the legacy of enslavement lives on in our bodies, our laws, and our cultural practices, it also goes directly into our bellies. Many of the items we see on our Thanksgiving tables, much of which I recognize as “soul food,” can teach us a lot about America — and about ourselves as Americans.

Thinking about all this encouraged me to reach out to poet, scholar, and author Caroline Randall Williams. Six years ago, Caroline authored a cookbook, Soul Food Love, with her mother Alice Randall, herself a celebrated author and the first black woman to co-author a No. 1 country hit. You might have also read Caroline’s op-ed for the New York Times in the summer of 2020. In it, she addressed the continued existence of monuments honoring Confederate soldiers with the viral opening line, “I have rape-colored skin.”

In this episode, we discuss not only some of the very good recipes in that book, but also how Southern “comfort food” has become everyday cuisine — sometimes to our detriment. How do we interpret African American culinary traditions in modern times, and what are we getting wrong?

Jamil Smith

How did you first come to identify or connect with food so intimately?

Caroline Williams

I’m torn about how to answer this question because I can’t figure out if I’m supposed to honor the ancestors or my living mother in the answer of it.

Jamil Smith

Honor the truth, that’s all.

Caroline Williams

I can say in broad strokes, I came to my relationship with food through the women in my family. The two things that came to mind were my Grandmother Joan’s kitchen, but then also the pictures of my mom feeding me as a baby, and the earliest memories of her doing all kinds of elaborate concoctions to try and make me happy when I was her baby girl.

So food as a way to communicate love has always been sort of central to that, I guess. And it’s always been part of our family stories. My first complete sentence was, “Mommy, artichoke please?” Which, I don’t know. That says so many things about me. My first sentence was about food, and it was about weird food, and it was polite, but it was also demanding.

Jamil Smith

I’d say that fits. You’ve requested an artichoke exactly one more time than I ever have.

How do you talk about food with your mother?

Caroline Williams

Well, that question is so layered these days, because we did write a whole book together. Co-writing a book is complicated under every circumstance, and writing one with your mother adds an extra layer of complication for sure, but also a layer of insight and love. So when Mom and I talk about food together, we’re really talking about family history. We’re talking about hard truths. We’re talking about shared memories. We’re talking about learning each other and our ancestors through the food, through the recipes, right?

And I think we’re talking about how we collaborate. Like, Mom and I, we don’t cook together that often. We cook for each other often, but not together often ’cause we cook so differently. Like, I’m a “clean up by myself while I cook” kinda girl, and Mom’s a mad scientist genius who gets all of the stuff done and then we sort of survey the landscape of the kitchen afterward. And then take a deep breath and clean. You know, you learn so much about each other.

So how do we talk about food? What the answer is is that food is in everything for us. It’s in our history. It’s in how we sit. It’s in how we gather. It’s in how we write, what we wanna write, our political concerns, our creative obsessions. Food tells stories, and food is about survival and Black joy, for me. And so is everything else I do.

Jamil Smith

It seems also to be a method of communication. And in being writers, we are used to communicating in certain ways.

I think certainly, our ancestors and our elders communicated to us through food. I remember, you know, thinking about Thanksgiving, and thinking about my grandmother’s macaroni and cheese with the skin on top, so to speak.

And honestly, because I grew up pescatarian, her making that special effort to make a little side dish for me and my mother while cooking for everybody else. And that, to me, communicated care and love. That, to me, also is the soul food that I remember, the food that literally fueled my soul.

What is soul food to you? And how do we come to call it that?

Caroline Williams

So this is an evolving question for me. I think that traditionally what I have said is, to me, soul food is food that’s prepared with love, to show that love to the people that you welcome to your table. In broad strokes, that’s what soul food is to me, is food that serves the body and soul of the people you love.

And I think that I use that definition because of the charge and challenge of the cookbook that Mom and I wrote together was really to try and reclaim narratives of health and body preservation through food in the Black story. And so I wanted to get away from this notion that all of our food is unhealthy, or the scope of our food is limited to the celebration food that we have traditionally, in the bigger picture, called soul food.

And I preface that question with — I have traditionally said, because I think that as I get older and as I evolve, I fall in love like with being Black again every day. Like I’m in love with it. I’m in love with our stories. I’m in love with the gift of this, being colored in America, together with the challenge of it. I do think that there is value in making the traditional lists of what soul food is too: the collard greens, the candied yams, the fried chicken, the cornbread, the monkey bread. The Hoppin’ John, the hush puppies, the fish.

Jamil Smith

(laughs) Right.

Caroline Williams

You know, the spaghetti. (laughs)

Jamil Smith

Mm-hmm.

Caroline Williams

All that stuff, the macaroni and cheese, the list of true comfort things that got put out on your Nana’s table. That stuff, as some iteration of soul food, is valuable to name because it conjures so many shared memories for all of us, and that creates community.

But there’s a challenge there. You wanna name the things that are obviously familiar to the group, but also I do feel a responsibility and a desire to expand the definition. Because when I bake a fish, that’s soul food to me. Because I know that that was what my grandfather did. He’d catch red snapper in Alabama, and he’d bake them in tin foil, and that was his favorite thing, and that to me is soul food then. Right? It’s clean, simple food that is soul food, because it tells a Black American story that makes me feel loved and connected to my ancestors.

Jamil Smith

I see comfort food and soul food, I think, being equated quite a bit. And soul food being, like you said, presented in the mind as a certain set of images. You know, the fried chicken, and a lot of things, frankly, that are not healthy for us.

I don’t know if equating the two is always appropriate. Do you see a distinction at all? And if so, why do you think that might be significant?

Caroline Williams

Well, I think that what is comforting and what serves the purpose that soul food serves are not always the same thing. Right? Like I get comforted by a warm bowl of mashed potatoes, or a bunch of macaroni and cheese or greens or whatever, on a plate that I can just endlessly dive into. But then that’s also some version of soul food.

But then again, this question of the purpose past the aesthetic. That’s something that I think about with the blues a lot too. Like the sound of the blues versus the feeling of it. That’s sort of how I feel about soul food.

It’s like, the blues had one sound. Old-time music had its own sound, and then it sort of evolved into the early primitive blues, country blues. Then you get the blues with the electric guitars and all of the different sounds that emerged in the ’50s and ’60s with the blues. John Lee Hooker sounds a lot different than Lead Belly, right? It’s still all the blues, but there’s this evolution.

And to me, the blues is the sound of Black American suffering made into popular art to soothe the people who were suffering in the South. Right? And that sound can change, but the spirit behind the sound … to me, that’s the spirit of the blues.

So the spirit of soul food is the flavors of what helps Black people survive. And you survive by being comforted, but you also survive by being well. So that’s the question, can this baked fish and these peppery vegan greens, can that be soul food? Because it keeps me well and also engages with my food history? I hope so. I mean for it to be.

I think that there’s a question of taking comfort and healthy comfort versus self-soothing and self-medicating, and all of those parts too. I can’t give you simple answers to these questions.

Jamil Smith

I don’t want simple answers.

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Kyle Rittenhouse’s tears

2021-11-12T09:56:29-05:00

Kyle Rittenhouse becomes emotional as he testifies during his trial at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Wisconsin on November 10. | Mark Hertzberg/Getty Images

What Kyle Rittenhouse displayed in a Kenosha, Wisconsin, courtroom this week as he testified in his homicide trial was what folks like to call an “ugly cry.”

Charged in the killings of two men and injury of another amid days of racial justice protests last summer, the defendant started to falter on the stand as he described that fateful night last August, when the then-17-year-old was armed with a rifle, patrolling the streets of a town that was not his own. Rittenhouse’s eyes shut almost completely, save for an occasional glance to his left in the direction of the jury. Then came the sobbing, which kept the rest of his response to his attorney’s questioning about that evening from escaping his quivering lips.

Rittenhouse’s blubbering was the headline of the day after the defendant offered his much-awaited testimony in the case Wednesday, recalling the night he shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber to death and “vaporized” much of the bicep of medic Gaige Grosskreutz, according to Grosskreutz’s testimony. Rittenhouse wasn’t weeping with regret; he was claiming self-defense, and recounting how he felt his life was in danger.

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The trial and pretrial proceedings had already sparked a national outcry after Judge Bruce Schroeder decided last month that prosecutors may not refer to Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz as “victims,” and that defense attorneys could call them “looters” or “arsonists.” Now with his tears, Rittenhouse has cast himself as the lone victim in his own homicide trial.

When he wasn’t crying, Rittenhouse explained why he had traveled the roughly 20 miles from Illinois. Earlier that day, he allegedly offered “condolences” to a business owner for cars that were set afire the previous night, and he said that he and a friend agreed to help provide armed protection for the business that night. The defendant also testified that he gave a bulletproof vest in his possession — issued by the Grayslake, Illinois, police department’s Explorer program for young people interested in law enforcement careers — to a friend, saying he felt he wouldn’t need it because, he recalled in the courtroom, “I’m going to be helping people.”

The Illinois teenager faces two counts of first-degree homicide and one of attempted homicide, along with three other charges in the shooting on August 25, 2020, just a couple of nights after a Kenosha police officer shot Black motorist Jacob Blake seven times in the back in front of three of his children. The killings of the demonstrators caused a national shock wave last summer, highlighting the powder keg of emotion surrounding arrests, clashes, and tense exchanges as tens of millions of Americans took to the streets to protest racial injustice.

The debate this week has centered on whether the defendant’s spectacle was authentic. Whether or not the crying was real, it was a performance, and it had an audience. Like many white men accused of violent crimes and misconduct before him, Rittenhouse appealed with his tears not merely to the 12 fellow citizens who will decide his fate, but also to certain white members of the American public who too often see emotion like that and imagine only the faces of their sons — not any born to mothers who look like mine.

There is evidence that Rittenhouse conspicuously aligned himself with the “blue lives matter” crowd, so it’s worth considering his sobbing within the context of the toxic and limited view of manhood that remains so popular in America, particularly among the modern political right. Some compared Rittenhouse to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reaction when questioned during his confirmation hearings about Christine Blasey Ford’s credible allegations of sexual assault. Wednesday’s display from Rittenhouse bore some similarities to Kavanaugh’s sanctimonious anger, which he often dotted with cracks in his voice. As I wrote at the time, the future Supreme Court justice took advantage of the leeway that his gender and privilege affords to him, and Rittenhouse did the same.

It is a particular privilege to be considered a “boy” after you’ve become an adult — and when you’ve made decisions like Rittenhouse’s. In Rittenhouse’s case, he was generously characterized by the New York Times as someone “who has idolized law enforcement since he was young” and went to Kenosha “with at least one mission: to play the role of police officer and medic.” The prosecution noted a number of his lies Wednesday, including false claims to the press about being an EMT. Part of the discomfort as we watched him emote, to say nothing of the suspicion, may be that we’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.

However, Rittenhouse’s emotion on the stand should be an indictment of his behavior, not an excuse for it. By law, he was too young to have the weapon he used to kill. He told the court that the reason he picked the AR-15-style rifle, as opposed to a handgun, is he thought “it looked cool.”

Legal experts I spoke with judged Rittenhouse’s testimony to be a positive for him, because the defense must have it both ways: While admitting to the facts of the shootings, they must show that Rittenhouse was the good guy that night, and that he feared for his life. If Rittenhouse provoked the conflict and shooting with his actions, he has no credible claim to self-defense. But if he can convince the jury that, as he told the court, it was either him or them, perhaps he created sufficient reasonable doubt. Time will tell.

American jurisprudence has bigger problems than Kyle Rittenhouse. This trial, however, is shining light on a few. Our legal system tends to treat young white men like him as sob stories rather than cautionary tales, especially if they exhibit anything approximating fear or remorse. The resentment and accusation of melodramatics is due in part to the reasonable presumption that another 17-year-old who isn’t white, committing the same act, wouldn’t receive the same sympathy. They wouldn’t be able to be caught in false statements — such as Rittenhouse’s claim on the night of the killing that Rosenbaum was armed when he allegedly threatened Rittenhouse prior to the shooting (Rosenbaum wasn’t) — and have any expectation that tears could secure their acquittal.

Rittenhouse’s victims were all white men, making them somewhat of an exception in American jurisprudence. Typically, such prejudgment is saved for people of color, and is handed out by law enforcement. If people of color even survive encounters with law enforcement and live to see the inside of a courtroom for the chance to be wrongfully convicted or disproportionately sentenced, it feels like a small miracle.

The self-styled militia patrolling the city that night were, by several accounts, mostly white men, yet another example of the unequally enforced protections of the Second Amendment. It isn’t that they didn’t have the right to do so, though Rittenhouse technically was too young (among the charges he faces is possessing a dangerous weapon under the age of 18).

Is it reasonable to think that a Black person similarly outfitted with a weapon of war during a civil rights protest in Kenosha would not have been arrested or potentially harmed by the police swarming the streets? If that person shot someone, would they be able to use the defense so many police officers use when killing Black and brown people — that they feared for their life? Tears on the stand didn’t work for the Exonerated Five in New York City back in 1989. Would they work for anyone who looked like us?

This speaks to much of the negative reaction to Rittenhouse’s display on the stand Wednesday. It isn’t simply that a killer cried about his own fear, rather than the lives he took. It represented the exercise of entitlement, the enduring perception of the youth of white men and boys who commit illegal acts.

Racial favoritism remains one of the many cancers afflicting our jurisprudence. By the late summer of 2020, there were fewer children incarcerated in the United States than at any point since the 1980s — but then a survey, released in March by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, revealed that even during a pandemic, the racial disparity in youth detention grew even wider, with white children in 30 states being released at a rate 17 percent higher than Black youths.

“America’s mistreatment of Black children is chronic and casual,” NYU law professor emerita Kim Taylor-Thompson wrote in May. “The ‘Black person as criminal’ stereotype, which equates dangerousness with skin color, has demonstrated remarkable resilience over time. It persists even in light of conflicting data.”

Kyle Rittenhouse can’t reverse that stereotype by himself, even if he’s convicted. It isn’t bad if Rittenhouse receives a fair trial. Everyone should. That’s the point. However, it’s the exploitation of the leeway too often given to young white defendants that makes people resentful, and rightfully so.

The manner in which Rittenhouse has been granted grace is astounding, but not necessarily bad. But Jacob Blake is paralyzed today, in part, because he didn’t receive the benefit of the doubt from a police officer that Rittenhouse has received from a legion of supporters (with even a judge seeming to tip the scales in his favor). If all lives truly mattered, that wouldn’t be the case.

Correction, 6 pm: A previous version of this story stated that Kyle Rittenhouse brought the AR-15-style rifle he used from Illinois. A friend of Rittenhouse’s is alleged to have purchased the gun for him in Wisconsin.