Magic Redemption, Amazing Disgrace
Ten federal judges believe that since racism ended in Mississippi in 1968, there’s no point in questioning whether racists denied Black people the right to vote
“Ol’ man river
That ol’ man river
he must know something
But don’t say nothing
He just keeps rolling,
He keeps on rolling along.”*
The Ghosts of Mississippi
were laid to rest in 1968.
Jim Crow died, oppressed were freed,
A tap tap, and racism disintegrated.
If such wholly penitent publics vote the same way
They voted decades long ago
Their votes mean something different now, and they
Can not maintain the same age-old racism. No. No. No.
Cured, magically redeemed, innocence is clear
Adding words like ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’ to some list
Is all it took to cleanse the sins of yesteryear.
Oh Lady Justice, would you please remove
Your blindfold and see your own scale?
Or at least open your eyes when you swing the sword
And send people off to jail?
- from the song, “Ol’ Man River,” Showboat
© 2022, Tom Tordillo
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Those magic words instantly, miraculously purged all racism from America, and we were reborn as a ‘colorblind’ nation, with all consequences of racism forever eliminated.
Except for that guy who shot King, of course. Everyone else is innocent.
The magical thinking behind such claims manifests frequently in legal standards, where reality doesn’t necessarily mean all that much to judges who wish to approve an outcome for whatever reason. By embracing such magical beliefs, judges who refuse to look at facts can assert that something that had been racist became ‘cured’ — because people did the same thing yet again after having ‘seen the light.’
Such was the majority’s reasoning this week in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Harness v. Watson (2022).
The dissent had the stronger argument:
In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional convention with the express aim of enshrining white supremacy. The 1890 Convention was a backlash against Reconstruction-era efforts to remedy centuries of chattel slavery and violence against Black people. The Convention was successful. The new constitution erased racial progress in Mississippi primarily through disenfranchising Black voters, formally beginning the Jim Crow era of the American South. Today the en banc majority upholds a provision enacted in 1890 that was expressly aimed at preventing Black Mississippians from voting. And it does so by concluding that a virtually all-white electorate and legislature, otherwise engaged in massive and violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, “cleansed” that provision in 1968. Handed an opportunity to right a 130-year-old wrong, the majority instead upholds it. I respectfully dissent.
But while the majority didn’t care, one judge who concurred with the majority went a bit further, adding his own twist on the term ‘Critical Race Theory.’
Judge Ho proposed the following hypothetical:
“Imagine the following hypothetical: An employer holds a job fair on a particular date. A racist group of police officers, unbeknownst to the employer, blocks the roads and highways so that a particular racial group cannot attend the job fair. The police officers are plainly guilty of racial discrimination. But the employer is not - even though there is now racial disparity at the job fair.
Judge Ho’s concurrence, Harness v. Watson
Well, OK. Let’s think about a job fair that gets tainted by racist police officers. Ordinarily, police officers don’t block candidates from any ole random job fair, not even in the Deep South. Since the basic issues concern police conduct toward the Black community, this particular hypothetical ‘job fair’ must involve jobs on the police force instead of any random company seeking random laborers.
So let’s consider: what happens if the police hold a recruitment job fair, some racist police officers block all the Black candidates from attending without the knowledge of the police chief, and thus, the police chief sees a pool of candidates that includes ZERO Black people, even though 90% of the community is Black.
Judge Ho posits that the police chief is innocent if he just proceeds to hire from the candidates before him. He has no duty to look any further into what happened. The racial disparity is not his fault, not unless someone can show how he ordered his own men to intentionally block all the Black candidates.
Critical race theory does not claim that the disparity among attendees at the job fair “proves” racism. It asserts, rather, that the disparity means something, and should be investigated further (and if investigated, it may very well expose racism). In Judge Ho’s ridiculous hypothetical, the police chief would be rewarded for refusing to do such an investigation — so long as he is lazy, stupid, corrupt, or cooperative with the racists (but not so stupid that he writes down explicit orders compelling them to be racists), the police chief will never be held accountable.
Consider what that would mean for every white candidate who did take a job at that job fair. All but the dumbest among them would also recognize that something was unfair — that they might get a job that others were not permitted to get — and that they could either cooperate with the people who did this, or lose a career. Either cooperate with the racists, or miss out.
Thus codes of silence form. Such ridiculous ‘logic’ fosters corruption in the one place where that cannot be tolerated. Where Judge Ho thinks he defends a Constitutional standard of ‘colorblindness,’ the standard he defends here is ‘actual blindness.’
“He must know something, but don’t say nothing.” It just keeps rolling along…
Graves would hold police forces to the standard they actually set for themselves: vigilance in defense of the law, including vigilance to the fact that other police officers may break it. Pity that Graves’ was in the minority on this decision.
