Picture this
scenario: An armed 17 year-old black male follows a white man at night on the suspicion
(based largely on his skin color) that he has criminal intent. A struggle
ensues – the black man says he was attacked – and a shot is fired. The white
man is killed. When the police arrive they question the black man, return his
gun to him and do not press charges. Only after a public outcry does the case
go to trial. The black man is acquitted.
The unlikelihood
of this scenario went through my mind when I heard that George Zimmerman had
been acquitted by a Florida jury of second degree murder in the case of the death
of Trayvon Martin. (Zimmerman is a Latino of mixed racial heritage; Martin was
African American.) The verdict will confirm the widely held belief that the
life of a black person is worth less than that of people of other skin tones. The
Stand Your Ground laws in effect in many US states reflect America’s obsession
with violence, individualism, fierce protection of property rights, and – above
all – fear of the non-white male. Legal scholars note that the Second Amendment
was originally written to preserve states’ slave patrol militias, which was
necessary to get Virginia's vote in ratifying the Constitution.
"Justice
involves claiming a shared, mutual humanity," writes john powell from the Berkeley School of Law, in the
opening sentence of his latest book, Racing
to Justice: Transforming our Conception of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. powell’s statement could be
read as a commentary on Trayvon Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal, but
it could well serve as a summary of a remarkable three-day international forum
on Healing History in Caux, Switzerland, which brought together an array of racial justice
advocates, healing practitioners, scholars, faith leaders and government
officials to address the pathology of racism through the lens of healing,
equity, and community.
While the
largest delegation was from the US, significant groups came from Africa and Europe
as well as South Asia and Australia. As Rajmohan Gandhi remarked, “the fallacy of
human hierarchy has wounded and humiliated millions…every part of
the world has felt the whiplash of racism.” The conference combined arresting data with powerful personal
stories. Participants not only discussed together but built relationships as
they chopped vegetables, washed dishes or made beds. Caux is a living community.
As I flew
back across the Atlantic I reflected on some of what we heard and learned.
- “We need to be in the business of
changing our belief system...asserting our true humanity as equal human beings," said Gail Christopher of the
W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Rajmohan Gandhi quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. “Every
nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to
preserve the best in their individual societies.”
- We learned that ending false hierarchies
makes good business sense. “Experience shows that racism is bad economics,” said Tim Carrington,
a journalist and development specialist who worked with the World Bank in
Africa. “Race has led America to make non-rational economic decisions,” according
to Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC. Noting that the US imprisons more of its
citizens than any other county he said, “Emphasizing prevention makes more economic
sense than emphasizing punishment.”
- We learned that the human brain processes
11 million bites of information every second but we are conscious of only 40 of
these at best. “Only 2
percent of emotional cognition is available to us consciously. The process of
‘Othering’ occurs in our subconscious network,” says john powell.
- We learned that place matters. According to David Williams of the Harvard School
of Public Health, a national study of the effects of segregation on young
African American adults found that the elimination of residential segregation
would erase Black-White differences in high school graduation rates, in
unemployment rates, and in earnings. It would also reduce racial differences in
single motherhood by two-thirds.
- We were urged to exert citizen
power. Mee Moua, a
former state senator from Minnesota whose family came from Laos as refugees,
told us, “If you don’t make room for yourself on the table you will be on the
menu.... We have to make ourselves relevant to those in power.” We need a “racial
impact assessment on every piece of public policy before it becomes law.”
- Empathy drives public policy. Stories have the power to move
people. How can a movement to uproot belief in racial hierarchy tell its
stories in such a way that actually impacts structures? We were reminded of
W.E. B Du Bois who wrote, “The most
difficult social problem in the matter of Negro health is the peculiar attitude
of the nation toward the well-being of the race. There have… been few other
cases in the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed
with such peculiar indifference.”
john powell,
who led a packed workshop in Caux on “unconscious bias,” concludes his introduction
to Racing to Justice: “Can we stop
focusing simply on transactional moves we see as winnable and start working for the transformation
of the institutions that perpetuate suffering? Can we speak to people’s deepest
needs – to feel a sense of connection, to feel love?”
In the final conference session, Scott Morris,
the founder of the Church Health Center in Memphis, which serves some 60,000
uninsured people concluded, "The daily work of justice and mercy are the
tools needed to create a city of good abode." Committing ourselves to this task is the best
response to the tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death.
Perhaps the days in Caux saw the start of a global conversation on racial
healing and equity that reflects what Edward Ayers, president of the University
of Richmond, called “the twin strands of honesty and hope.”
