The Modern-Day Lynching: Why it’s Time to Reform our Justice System
By: Brian Diveley
Tags: White Privilege, Police Brutality, Racism, Reform, Justice

(Photo Credits: CNN)

Despite the pleas of the jury that convicted him and the prosecutors that charged him, Brandon Bernard became the youngest person at the time of conviction to be executed in over seventy years. This comes amidst public outrage at the Trump Administration kicking it’s rebooted focus on federal executions into high gear during its lame-duck ending. In fact, the federal government has now executed more human beings via the death penalty since the summer, than it did in the preceding sixty years. It is quite simply inexcusable for a developed nation like our own to engage in the quintessential state-sanctioned lynching like the death penalty, especially given its long sordid history in our country.

Throughout our great experiment in governance and democracy, the long shadow of white supremacy has remained an everlasting constant, infesting itself within our society as a whole. Even with the defeat of slavery as a stain upon our expressed founding values, or the rejection of Jim Crow leading to an expansion of civil rights nationwide, time and time again the worst impulses of our history have lingered and brought our nation low.

Since just 1976, the United States has engaged in the state-sponsored murder of over 1,500 Americans in our criminal justice system, with those being disproportionately African American. This isn’t new. In the aftermath of the Civil War, and the crumbling of Reconstruction in the South, the former slaveowners wanted to find a way to contain, subjugate, and murder those they still viewed as inferior property. They feared losing their grip on political power and their myth of racial superiority, and while we in history primarily focus on the Ku Klux Klan being a primary adjudicator of this paranoia, we neglect the ties to our criminal justice system today.

The beginnings of the justice system as we know it today tells the tale of racism and greed firsthand. Those we entrust to protect and serve our communities, the police, came as a direct result of white supremacy. From their earliest days in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to the clinging onto power during Reconstruction, the police acted as instruments by which to depress African American freedom and opportunity wherever they could find it. With the rise of the police came the rise of mass incarceration, also a result of the South wanting to retain their white supremacist identities. A loophole that still exists within our 13th Amendment allowed those in power to regain their old ways of slavery through legal means:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” — 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865).

Except as a punishment for a crime. Those words paved the way for the prison- industrial complex and the degree of mass incarceration that continues to exist to this day. Whatever actions defined as mischief or unruly behavior by local governments then became the justification for the re-enslavement of tens of thousands of African Americans in a newly organized prison system. Convicts were sent to work plantations and fields, clear land for government infrastructure, and act as manual labor to those who could pay the prison enough for their services. Demand for labor continued to rise, leading to more police, more prisons, more incarceration. Profit and racism became the standard display of power and control against men and women of color. Thus we arrive at our present circumstances, where our justice system continues to utilize these lingering vestiges of white supremacy in burning down communities and fueling cruel industries of control.

Today, the United States accounts for just six percent of the world’s population, yet over a quarter of the world’s incarcerated population. We have more police homicides than just about every developed nation combined, with the violence being targeted disproportionately against people of color. Our prison-industrial complex relies squarely on retribution and recidivism rather than rehabilitation and re-entry. For-profit prisons dot the landscape of America, with ties to judges and those in law enforcement who keep the abhorrent prison pipeline flowing. Though lynching may be illegal for private citizens to engage in, our own government personally takes it upon itself to murder its own citizens in barbaric and inhumane displays of “justice.” The sins of our fathers continue to haunt the dreams of us in the present, and that is something that cannot be left to fester in the soul of our nation. Government perpetuation of racial exploitation and subjugation must be brought to a swift and decisive end, with a more just and equitable system rising in its place.

The mythos of America has mostly left the truth of history hidden away from fragile eyes: the best-kept secret of those who perpetuate the systems of subjugation to this day. In our public schools, we are taught about the white heroes of history, with passing glances at or excuses given to those who committed atrocity after atrocity. We pay near-zero attention to African American voices and African American heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer or Lewis Howard Latimer, except when it can be used to paint America in a more flattering light. Far too often, we see the truth as being too compromising, too offensive, too unpatriotic: that it becomes unbefitting of our nation to be educated on the reality of our history. That will be one of the most critical challenges of our next generations: to see through the veil of white intolerance and fragility and speak truth to power about the vast array of issues facing our society. To pull back the curtains on the corrupt and inhumane origins of our criminal justice system is to take the first important steps in reforming it.

Too many men and women have had to pay the ultimate price of our archaic justice system. We’ve seen the horrifying extrajudicial murders by the government of countless human beings: Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Casey Goodson, and so many others. Meanwhile, the death penalty has claimed the lives of so many people who were well on the road to rehabilitation: Brandon Bernard amongst them. We cannot accept this as the normal status quo of our country. We must demand better, we must do better, we must be better.