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What America Owes to Blacks and What Blacks Owe to Each Other

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What America Owes to Blacks and What Blacks Owe to Each Other What America Owes to Blacks and What Blacks Owe to Each Other Randall Robinson* This community, this university, this Berkeley, has done so much to change the course of American policy. So many wonderful traditions. And in no other place in our memory is it more keenly felt and recognized by young people that our young are the moral and social conscience of our society. In no other place is it more clearly recognized that perhaps this is one's best, and sometimes last, opportunity to act on principle without fixed responsibility. And I can think of no time in my lifetime that our country, that our world, needs your leadership more than now. I think our campuses are at a disturbing end in activism. But, you see, therein lies the real opportunity for leadership. Leadership means the first to believe, to see, and to do what is right. It also means the capacity to see the future from where you stand now. I am not ordinarily a doomsayer, but I believe that our society and our world are in deeper crisis than at any time in my lifetime. It is not easy to see through the bombardment of news coverage that ignores most of the critical problems of our time. But, it is indeed there. We should pay heed, and we should do so now. Thus, when I talk about reparations, I am not merely talking about restitution to the contemporary victims of American slavery for slavery and the century of the de jure discrimination that followed it. I am talking about the repair of our general society. I am talking about the resuscitation of compassion. I am talking about the essential notions of decency in a viable democratic society. Many years ago, William Faulkner wrote that the past is never dead, it is not even past.' Many of us will be the beneficiaries of anonymous success. Many of us, unfortunately, will be the victims of anonymous failure. But for the vast majority of us, our lives are terribly predictable. Most of us finish somewhere near to where we start. For those of us who start with good chances, failure-irrespective of the relative normalness of your abilities-is all but impossible. But, for those who are not here today-who start so far * Author and foreign policy advocate; founder and former president of TransAfrica; J.D., Harvard Law School, 1970; [email protected]. 1. WILLIAM FAULKNER, REQUIEM FOR A NUN 92 *Noel Polk ed., Garland Pub. 1987) (1951) ("The past is never dead. It's not even past."). AFRICAN-AMERICAN LAW & POLICY REPORT [VOL. VI: I behind in the race of life-success for them is virtually impossible. Sadly, we live in a country with little memory of anything that happened more than two weeks ago. We have lost all capacity to link a failed contemporary condition to anything but that individual's failure to overcome their particular difficulties. America, all of my life, has been a majority white country. 2 Sixty years from now that will not be the case.3 We are becoming a new society. If we are to adhere and cohere in a democratic culture, in a sane and civilized fashion, we must learn to behave very differently towards one another. We will no longer be able to afford to ignore plights about which we've been given little opportunity to learn. African-Americans account for about 14% of America's nonviolent-drug offenses,4 yet they account for 35% of arrests for non-violent drug offenses,5 55% of convictions for nonviolent drug offenses,6 75% of prison admissions for nonviolent drug offenses.7 Consider that-14% of the crime, 75% of the prison admissions. Should we not be disturbed in a democratic society-not just disturbed as to be shocked, but disturbed in such a fashion as to ask why so that we can address the condition? In a democratic country like ours, with one-twentieth of the world's people, we have one-fourth of the world's prisoners. 8 We have two million prisoners, half of whom are African-Americans. 9 In America if one is a young white male, one's chances of being incarcerated are one in fifteen.10 If one is Hispanic, one in ten." I If one is a young black American male, one in 12 three. Shouldn't that disturb us? 2. See GIBSON CAMPBELL ET AL., Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790-1990, For the United States, Regions, Divisions and States, in U.S. CENSUS BUREAU POPULATION DIVISION (2000), at http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/ tab01.xls (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 3. Id. at 6-11, at http://www.census.gov/population/projections/nation/summary/np-t4-g.pdf (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 4. Drug Policy Alliance Website, Race and the Criminal Justice System (Mar. 15, 2004), availableat http://www.drugpolicy.org/race/ (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 5. Id. 6. Id. 7. See HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, Racially Disproportionate Incarceration of Drug Offenders, in PUNISHMENT & PREJUDICE: RACIAL DISPARITIES IN THE WAR ON DRUGS (2000), at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00-04.htm (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 8. Anthony Lewis, Punishing the Country, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 21, 1999, at AI. 9. See, e.g., Scott Shane, Locked up in the Land of the Free, BALT. SUN, June 1, 2003, available at http://www.charleston.net/stories/060103/wor._0 ljailbirds.shtml (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 10. See HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, supra note 7, at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/ (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 11. See id. 12. See id. 2004] WHAT AMERICA OWES TO BLACKS The State of New York from the early 1700s until 1981 built thirty-three state prisons. From 1982 until 1999 the State of New York built thirty-eight more.13 Rockefeller, 14 a liberal Republican governor of New York, began this kind of rush with the Rockefeller Drug Laws.' 5 Nonviolent drug offenses in the 16 state of New York resulted in prison terms of up to fifteen17 years. States like Texas have followed with even more Draconian laws. What has this meant? When I used to work in the Congress, my Congressional office used to hand out this little brochure to visitors who came to Washington to see what their tax dollars bought. This brochure was entitled How Our Laws Are Made. Of course, it had nothing to do with how our laws are made. I came to understand, over years of reviewing policy and history, that you cannot understand public policy unless you can ask and answer a few simple questions, the first of which is-who benefits? It is seldom in the papers and it is not in your course materials. Who are the anonymous faces and forces that benefit from the passage of this bill and the defeat of that? Now I have also come to believe-perhaps cynically, but I think realistically-that there is something else you have to be able to do to understand why policy is made and why our nation does what it does, both at home and abroad. You must be able to follow the money. If you cannot follow the money, you cannot understand public policy. We have a state prison building juggernaut running mad in America. California has spent four orfive times more on the construction of prisons over the last twenty to twenty-five years than it has on the construction, ground-up, of new higher education institutions. 18 Four or so prisons, private prisons, are being constructed now in the state of California. Once they are built, beds will be available to make the facilities profitable. Bodies will have to be found to fill those beds. Way across the country, there is a little town in upstate New York, called Malone. Most of you have never heard of it, but it illustrates the point. Malone 13. See Eric Schlosser, The Prison-Industrial Complex, ATLANTIC ONLINE (Dec. 1998), availableat http://www.theatlantic.con/issues/98dec/prisons.htm (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 14. Former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. 15. AARON D. WILSON, ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS INFORMATION SHEET, available at http://www.prdi.org/rocklawfact.html (Mar. 15, 2004). 16. CORRECTIONAL ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK, EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVES TO THE DRUG LAW: WHAT WORKS BEST FOR NONVIOLENT DRUG OFFENDERS 11 (2001), available at http://www.droptherock.org/effective.htm (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 17. Press Release, Justice Policy Institute, Texas Sentencing Reforms Reflect National Trends (June 24, 2003), available at http:llwww.protex.orglcriminaljustice/incarceration/ TXTrendReleaseNat'l .htn (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). 18. Press Release, Justice Policy Institute, State Spending on Prisons Grows at 6 Times the Rate of Higher Education (Aug. 28, 2002), available at http://www.justicepolicy.org/ article.php?id=14 (last visited Mar. 15, 2004). AFRICAN-AMERICAN LAW & POLICY REPORT [VOL. VI: I is an all white suburb. It reached its pinnacle in the late 1930s with the trial of Dutch Schultz,19 who was a colleague of Al Capone. After the trial, the town went into a nose-dive. Sears and Roebuck closed. The hotel closed. Everything closed. Malone was back on its heels. But, Malone knew what Rockefeller had done and what Governor Cuomo would have to do. Rockefeller had passed the Drug Laws, but it was the "liberal" Democrat Cuomo who started to build state prisons willy-nilly in the state of New York. ° So, the little town of Malone applied for a state prison and got two.
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