Hey, have you heard? Michelle Alexander, author of the best-selling New Jim Crow, has resigned as law professor and has entered Union Theological Seminary as both a student and a teacher. She realizes that unjust mass incarceration and the racial profiling that often accompanies it, is primarily a moral problem, an ethical problem, not just a political or legal problem.
She's right, but I am afraid that, in the end, she will also be profoundly disappointed in the American church. As Pope Francis has said most of the church prefers the comfort, the security, of the sanctuary over the suffering in the streets; stained glass windows over justice for the poor and oppressed. The white church, as a whole, is more a part of the problem than it is leading the way toward a solution. 400 years of oppression. If the church becomes more biblical, it could lead society toward a solution.
Next some quotations from Alexander which reveal the depth of our problem:
"Much of black progress is a myth."
"African Americans, as a group, are no better off than they were in 1968 in many respects. In fact, to some extent, they are worse off. When the incarcerated population is counted in unemployment and poverty rates, the best of times for the rest of America have become among the worst of times for African Americans, particularly black men. As sociologist Bruce Western has shown, the notion that the 1990s---the Clinton years---were good times for African Americans, . . . is pure fiction. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels in the late 1990s for the general population, jobless rates among non college black men in their twenties rose to their highest levels ever, propelled by skyrocketing incarceration rates. . . . Prisoners are literally erased from the nation's economic picture, leading standard estimates to underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less-educated black men."
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