A Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America's History of Racial Injustice
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Late one night several years ago, I got out of my care on a dark midtown Atlanta street when a man standing fifteen feet away pointed a gun at me and threatened to “blow my head off.” I’d been parked outside my new apartment in a racially mixed but mostly white neighborhood which I didn’t consider a high-crime area. As the man repeated the threat, I suppressed my first instinct to run and fearfully raised my hands in helpless, terrifying submission to the barrel of a handgun. I tried to stay calm, begged the man not to shoot me, repeated over and over again, “It’s all right, it’s okay.” As a young criminal defense attorney, I knew that my survival required careful, strategic thinking, I had to stay calm. Id’ just returned home from my law office in a car filled with legal papers, but I knew the man holding the gun wasn’t targeting me because he thought I was a young professional. Since I was a young, bearded black man dressed casually in jeans, most people would not assume I was a lawyer with a Harvard Law School degree; I looked like most young black men in America. I had filled my head as a college philosophy major with the nonviolent teaching of King and Gandhi; I even thought of myself as “peace-loving.” But to the Atlanta police officer threatening to shoot me I looked like a criminal, someone dangerous and guilty. There was not legitimate reason for a police officer to point a gun at my head and threaten to shoot me in front of my apartment. I had been sitting in my beat-up Honda Civic for over fifteen minutes listening to music which could not be heard outside the vehicle. There was a delicious Sly and the Family Stone retrospective playing on a local radio station that had so engaged me I couldn’t turn the radio off. It had been a long day at work. A neighbor must have been alarmed by the sight of a black man sitting in his car and called the police. My getting out of my car to explain to the police officer that this was my home and mothering criminal was taking place is what prompted the officer to pull his weapon and start making threats. Having drawn his weapon, the officer and his partner justified their threat of lethal force by dramatizing their fears and suspicions about me. They threw me on the back of the vehicle, they searched my car illegally, and they kept me on the street for fifteen humiliating minutes while neighbors gathered to view the dangerous criminal in their midst. When no crime was discovered and nothing incriminating turned up after a computerized background check on me, I was told by the police officers to consider myself lucky. While this was said as a taunt and threat, they were right: I was lucky. People of color in the United States, particularly young black me, are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness. Some version of what happened to me has been experienced by millions of black people because of this racially biased presumption. In too many situations, black people are presumed to be offenders incapable of being victims themselves. As a consequence of this country’s historical failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and the racial narrative that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system. The issue of racially motivated police violence or racial disparities in sentencing can’t be viewed simply as a consequence of bad police officers or racially biased judges. There are deep historical forces that have created the problems so clearly seen in America’s criminal justice system. There is a narrative of racial difference that contaminates the thinking of most Americans. We are burdened by our history of racial injustice in ways that shape the way we think, act, and enforce the law. Without understanding this narrative, confronting it truthfully and repairing the damage created by our history, we will never truly experience the equality and fairness we value so highly in our legal system. As in South Africa, Rwanda, and Germany, America desperately needs to commit itself to a process of truth and reparation. We need to own up to the way racial bias and legalized racial subordination have compromised our ability to implement justice. In the wake of decades of our avoiding or minimizing our history of racial injustice, communities from Ferguson to Charleston to Baltimore now bear witness to what we have wrought.
Source Publication
Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment
Source Editors/Authors
Angela J. Davis
Publication Date
2017
Recommended Citation
Stevenson, Bryan A., "A Presumption of Guilt: The Legacy of America's History of Racial Injustice" (2017). Faculty Chapters. 1726.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1726
