Town hall held on the ‘State of Race Relations and Policies’
21st June 2021 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
American society is slowly undergoing positive change toward racial equity and justice, but many more bold actions are needed to solve the institutional challenges facing the country, said panelists in a recent online town hall hosted by the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.
On May 25, the NCRM, which is located at the Lorraine Motel, the site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., held a virtual forum to discuss the status of race relations in America and the movement toward racial equity, economic and social justice, and societal fairness and opportunity.
The town hall, titled “Where Do We Go from Here? State of Race Relations & Policies,” was sponsored by Keepers of 306, an NCRM action initiative focused on young, civic-minded leaders. Keepers of 306 incoming co-chair Brooke Jones called her organization “an initiative designed to inform and inspire the next generation of leaders to invest their time in furthering the mission of the National Civil Rights Museum.”
The May 25 event was the third such online forum in a series by the organization, and Jones began the 45-minute town hall saying the group wants the series “to implore viewers to become civically engaged and activate change through our votes and presence at the polls.”
Jones said the 2020 elections have served as a successful jumping-off point for social change.
“We listened, we questioned, we mobilized and we exercised our civic duty to vote,” she said. “We must remain informed and engaged, and in the process we must learn about the policies that are evaluated and implemented during this time.”
Significantly, the May 25 town hall, which was moderated by Memphis broadcast journalist Jonee’ Lewis, included a local connection. One of the panelists was Will Snowden, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice, based in New Orleans. The Vera Institute was created in 2006 as an organization tasked by the New Orleans City Council with exploring the post-Katrina criminal legal system in Louisiana and proposing possible methods of reform and avenues for achieving social justice.
During the NCRM town hall, Snowden outlined the Vera Institute’s current reform efforts and evaluated the state of the modern criminal legal system, especially in the wake of the George Floyd murder trial and the Black Lives Matter activist movement.
Snowden said American society needs to take a long, hard look at itself and the criminal justice mechanisms that have resulted from centuries of injustice and racial discrimination.
“It’s important for us to question the systems we have inherited and the origins of the police system,” he said.
He said we need to assess and define what the idea of police accountability means and what achieving accountability might look like. He assailed the prevailing, widespread concept of qualified immunity that continues to shield lawmakers and law enforcement from the legal repercussions of their unjust, discriminatory and often violent actions.
“We have this protective veil of qualified immunity that protects police officers from being held accountable or responsible for their conduct,” Snowden said.
He added that the continual and chronic killing of Black citizens by police is glaring evidence that the law-enforcement apparatus must be radically reformed. He also said that it isn’t just police that must be scrutinized – it’s also those people in the courtroom.
“When we talk about mass incarceration, when we talk about problems in our criminal legal system, we have to understand that the local district attorneys hold so much power in reducing mass incarceration, and they hold the keys and hold the power to decide what types of charges should be prosecuted and what types should be refused,” he said.
Snowden said that’s why local elections for offices such as DA and various judgeships must be viewed with equal importance as federal and state elections.
However, he added that the newly inaugurated national administration of President Joe Biden must set the proper tone for the country when it comes to criminal legal reform. Snowden stressed that the Biden administration needs to begin taking confident, concrete, bold steps in the matter.
“When we think about what principles this country was founded on, one of the things we name is the sanctity of individual liberty,” he said. “But as we know, our criminal legal system is often positioned to continue the confinement of Black and Brown bodies. That’s what the numbers tell us, that there’s an overrepresentation of Black folks in jails and prisons.
“Race should no longer be a predictor of outcome in any system, and right now we’re talking about the criminal legal system,” he added.
He said that dysfunction and racism in other societal systems, such as housing policy and educational structures, all provide currents that feed into and poison the criminal legal system, all of which the Biden administration must address through actions like judicial appointments and housing policy.
“Making the connections very obvious, when we improve our educational system , when we improve our access to fair housing, when we improve our child welfare system, that’s going to have a positive effect on our criminal legal system and make our criminal legal system more equitable,” he said.
Another participant in last month’s virtual town hall was Lily Axelrod, an immigration defense attorney in Memphis, who represents defendants in immigration court facing deportation or other federal actions. She helps with translation services in court and has filed several cases against the federal government for refusing to swiftly and adequately adjudicate immigration cases.
Axelrod said that while many Americans were rightly horrified by recent images from the U.S.-Mexico border of children being torn away from their parents, “that’s something that didn’t just begin or end with the Trump administration.” She believes the new administration has started taking encouraging steps to reunite children with their parents or guardians, but she added that parental separation also occurs elsewhere throughout the country, and that the reuniting process faces numerous hurdles.
“The Biden administration has talked a good game about being more humane in our asylum system at the border and has started off strong with some executive orders at the beginning of the term repealing the discriminatory Muslim ban,” Axelrod said, “but unfortunately we’re continuing to see quite a lot of detention at the border, and we’re still seeing expulsions under Title 42,” which allows federal officials to summarily deport immigrants under suspicion of communicable disease.
“There are people who are eligible for asylum but are being shipped off anyway without due process or legal protection,” she added. “I’m hoping that continued advocacy on the ground will push the administration in the right direction. Honestly, it’s been disappointing. I would have expected to see more and bigger change by this point in the administration.”
Axelrod also said that quota systems and legal and bureaucratic logjams continue to mean that the immigration system is chronically overloaded and ill-equipped to handle the amount of cases before it, resulting in children and other migrants being deported or rejected for asylum “simply because the line is too long.”
Finally, Axelrod echoed Snowden’s belief that modern systems that are inequitable and discriminatory, whether it be the criminal legal system or, in her field, the immigration system, remain so powerful and damaging because they’ve been built over many, many years.
In this case, she said, the long-established immigration system has resulted in inadequate laws that provide no way for people to seek citizenship legally, depriving them of their political rights despite the fact that those same people contribute greatly to the national economy and culture.
“The laws were not written that way by accident,” Axelrod said. “Our immigration laws are entwined with racist exclusion and racist policing from the start [resulting in] overpolicing in communities of color and then extremely harsh consequences for non-citizens once their in the courts.”
The third panelist for the NCRM town hall was Stephen Harrington, an economic policy leader and director and the director of external affairs at the Quicken Loans corporation in Washington, D.C., Harrington assists people of color in finding affordable, fair housing options and encourages home ownership as a way for Black and Brown citizens to achieve financial success and as a primary method for closing the wealth gap between minority communities and the rest of the population.
He said the wealth gap is particularly pronounced for Black women and families headed by a single Black mother. Harrington said that Quicken Loans, and he personally, attempts to help people of color build their wealth and achieve financial security and success through additional means, like investing in the stock market and saving for retirement, methods that are often typical in white homes but not financially overburdened Black homes.
“What you’re looking at now is the inability of Black women and Black families and others to invest their dollars to engage in a mortgage,” he said.
Harrington said another way to assist minority populations in achieving more financial stability and better quality of life is student loan forgiveness, something the Biden administration has begun to undertake on a limited scale, giving Harrington reason for optimism.
“I do believe we will see some form of loan forgiveness for a vast variety of borrowers,” he said.
Harrington said student loan debt disproportionately affects Black and Brown populations because they are more likely to need funding assistance for higher education, a result of generations-old political, legal and economic systems that prevent minority families from building wealth, achieving financial security and generating the means to pay for an education themselves.
“We’re looking at a level of economic freedom that people just don’t have right now, and the benefits [to the national economy] of loan forgiveness far outweigh the costs to the [U.S.] Treasury,” he said. “We’re looking at buying power and the ability to stabilize their lives and grow their families and grow the economy or start a business that they can’t do with debt.”
Harrington also reflected on the way the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted minority communities, and the role played in their economic recovery by the subsequent federal assistance programs that have been passed, such as stimulus payments, unemployment benefits and a moratorium on housing evictions.
He said that many in American society falsely believe that such benefits make recipients lazy and unwilling to search for employment, a belief fed by racist perceptions and bigotry. Harrington stressed the importance of not only short-term actions like stimulus payments and unemployment assistance, but also more long-term, institutional changes, such as raising the minimum wage to match inflation and providing system-wide child-care options, in the effort to return people to employment and help them attain economic stability and happiness.
“In the end, it’s really up to businesses and the government to reimagine how [employment] looks,” he said.
He added that establishing a living wage “would have ancillary economic benefits” like better education and health care that would set people up for better lives and lead to the overall stability and wealth of society.
“We would be better able to improve society for all of us,” he said.
That means people must stop viewing large-scale spending – whether it be through social programs like welfare and public education, or via private companies raising their wages – less as costs and more as investments in society as a whole.
“We need to change that conversation, that [such expenses] are not just ‘freebies,’ but as investments in people who would pay them out [to society] throughout their lives and through all sorts of [social] benefits,” he said.
The town hall concluded with the panelists suggesting tangible, direct ways that young adults can help affect change and promote racial equity of social justice, including voting in local elections, enthusiastically serving jury duty, contacting their senators and Congress members, and volunteering to help with language translation services. All three stressed the importance of civic engagement and activism at the state and local levels as a way to lay the foundation for structural and institutional change.
This article originally published in the June 21, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
