Much More Than a Few Bad Cops

An August 16 Des Moines Register editorial headline reads: "Baltimore a disgrace to all law enforcement: Investigation reveals pervasive racism, sexism and arrogance."  A quotation from the editorial:

"Investigators recount story after story of police hounding black residents, systematically stopping, searching and arresting them, often without cause.  Though black residents account for 63 percent of the city's population, 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses like trespassing between 2010 and 2016 were African-American.  Blacks account for 82 percent of traffic stops."

Our current racial tension run much deeper than a few bad cops, much deeper than a few bad police department such as Ferguson and Baltimore.  Congress, President Reagan and the Supreme Court are responsible for much of our current mess asserts Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow.

Congress passed the War on Drugs which was terribly misguided public policy; for the most part, drug use, drug addiction is primarily a moral problem (hello, church) and a public health problem, not a criminal justice problem.

The second tragic mistake:  President Reagan added racial profiling to the War on Drugs creating a toxic social mix which resulted in the unjust mass incarceration of young black and Latino males which not only destroyed countless individuals lives but also devastated millions of black and Hispanic families as well.

The third mistake:  With the McCleskey decision and related decisions, the Supreme Court legitimated the War on Drugs and racial profiling.

And the greatest ethical failure regarding our current racial crisis lies with the white American church; with a few exceptions, the church has been silent and on the sidelines during this our national nightmare, while a new system of radicalized oppression replaced slavery and the old Jim Crow.

Next, I would like to quote Michelle Alexander, America's top expert on these issues; Alexander is black civil rights lawyer when she wrote The New Jim Crow in 2010.  She says that 10 years earlier not even she understood that a new racial caste had been created through the misuse of the criminal justice system.  She thought it was only some racism tainting what was otherwise a pretty good system.

"In each generation, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals---goals shared by the Founding Fathers.  Denying African Americans citizenship was deemed essential to the formation of the original union. . . .  An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history.  They are also subject to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits and jury service, just as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents once were."

"Rather than rely on race, we use the criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminal' [criminalblackman], and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.  Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. . . .  We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."

At one time, Alexander "understood the problems plaguing poor communities of color, including problems associated with crime and rising incarceration rates, to a function of poverty and lack of access to quality education---the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.  Never did I seriously consider the possibility that a new racial caste system was operating in this country.  The new system had been developed and implemented swiftly, and it was largely invisible, even to people, like me, who spent most of their waking hours fighting for justice."

"In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times those of white men.  And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young Africa-American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.  These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society."

American Pharisees, sometimes known as Evangelicals

Iowa's white evangelicals will soon be voting for bigoted billionaire for president, in large numbers.  How do I know?  Northwest Iowa is the hotbed of Iowa's white evangelicals.  For many years, they have voted to send Rep. King, a fundamentalist conservative back to Congress again and again.  D. T. and King share many extreme political ideas; for example, on Mexican immigrants.

Iowa evangelicals are not biblical evangelicals, but are highly Americanized 'evangelicals'.  A better name would be Pharisee. Pharisees, according to Jesus, loved money, neglected justice and the love of God.  Iowa Pharisees enjoy white superiority and white privilege, American ethnocentrism and American oppression.  For them, white is natural and normal, good and right, even divinely ordained.

Such arrogant American Pharisees see no need to repent, restitute, and repair the enormous damage done by nearly 500 years of white ethnocentrism and oppression.