A New Notoriety?

An open letter to the no-longer-quite-so-notorious RBG

Dear Justice Ginsburg:

My disappointment couldn't be greater. I thought you were a champion of my rights, but I see now that perhaps I gave you more credit than you deserved. When you suggested (who am I kidding, you did not merely 'suggest', you were pretty clear) that the protest of Kaepernick and others in support of Black life was dumb and disrespectful, I found myself utterly disappointed.

I appreciate every opinion you have written and the overall effect of your work on the bench, but I have to say that your referring to Colin Kaepernick's protest as arrogant and stupid really shook me for a moment. Fortunately, my distress was only momentary.

I keep finding myself having to re-learn that in this society the label liberal doesn't necessarily translate to passionately committed to equality. The great epiphany your utterances forced upon me is this: equality for you is a matter of law whereas for me, it is a matter of existence.

There is no part of my existence that isn't challenged by continuing efforts to erode the notion - at this point it really is only a notion - of equality in these United States. My economic life? Shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. My professional life? Shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. My access to health care, education, environmental justice? All, shaped by others' willingness to accept the idea of equality. Reading most of our country's history, as I know you have, one cannot but acknowledge that the journey to equality has long been a helluva challenge for the majority. Pick an era when people of color made the tiniest step forward, then take a look at the era subsequent, and the effort to erase or reverse that step is certain to be found. The truth is out there.

It is in this that we differ.  For you it seems 'equality' is this thing you talk about Monday to Friday, from nine o'clock in the am until five o'clock pm. For me, equality is the journey of every one of the 86,400 seconds of every blessed day. There is no moment when my 'equality' or my 'freedom' can be readily accessed without the possibility of challenge. This is why Kaep kneels.

While you are free to dismiss (and then return a few days later chastened) the protests born of Black folks' reality, that is a privilege to which I do not have access. While you are free to not even know what the protest is about and yet, ignorant of the details, know with an alarming degree of certainty that it is dismissible, that is a privilege I do not have. This is why Kaep kneels. 

You are, of course, absolutely entitled to your opinion on Kaepernick, just as I am entitled to my opinion of your opinion. That's what freedom is.

However, freedom begins to end, and something else begins, when your opinion coupled with your relative power, has the capacity to negatively impact my access to basic safety. When your opinion + your power have the capacity to ennoble the unlawful (and often deadly) actions of police officers, vigilantes, right wing zealots, and various internet trolls against people like me. That is not freedom. Well, to be certain, in that situation, you continue to enjoy freedom, but it is a version of freedom that undermines and negates mine. 

Herein lies another thing that differentiates between us.

For you, the SCOTUS serves to solidify the law; to establish clear, hard lines that must not be crossed. Yet, don't those lines get crossed anyway? Don't people get executed who shouldn't? Don’t people spend decades in jail who oughtn’t? Don't bad things happen to good people (and sometimes to bad ones as well)?

In your SCOTUS-world, justice requires that I first be harmed. That is justice to you. It ain’t no justice to me, however. I’m not surprised that you’re OK with this version of American justice though, since you’re not the one being shot at, brutalized, or worse, killed.

We would prefer not to be harmed at all. This is why Kaep kneels.

We would prefer a system that seeks to prevent our injury, rather than one that offers a Band-Aid for our bullet wounds. Your comfort with reactive justice works for you because that is the privilege that your position and race afford you. My commitment though, must be to pre-emptive justice; proactive justice; justice at the initial point of contact with the system, rather than at the end. 

After 400 years of America’s reactive approach to ‘justice’, people of color have cottoned on to the fact that the time for a proactively just system is now. This is why Kaep kneels.  This is why others now join him: because there is no effective redress for the fatal harms the system so giddily metes out.

It matters not what your opinion is on the case of Tamir Rice, John Crawford III, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Jeremy Mardis, or the hundreds of other men, women, and children slaughtered by police, because they’ve all gone to glory, and there is still no treatment for that. There’s no assessment you and your sister and brother justices can offer that will bring redress. And so we kneel.

It matters not the results of your ex post facto review of the case of X or Y prisoner held on Death Row for a crime he/she did not commit. Those days, weeks, months, years are lost. Forever. We seek justice first. We seek a system wherein equality is the basis, the starting point, not a result insisted upon by a judge and which – like the SCOTUS school desegregation order of 1954 – can be flouted by the powerful.

The courts' eventual adjudication of innocence for the dead or the falsely accused/incarcerated serves no purpose other than to give the system and those who hold privilege within it a reason to feel good; such adjudication is but an opportunity for the society to pretend it is evolving. The reality is that those who were harmed in the first place remain eternally harmed.

This form of redress is a Pyrrhic victory of the meanest sort. SCOTUS justice, with all due respect, is a Sponge Bob Square Pants Band-Aid on a gaping, festering sore. The financial, social and emotional consequences of having been fatally wronged can never be fixed. There can be no ‘justice’ after the fact. This is why Kaepernick kneels.

It would have cost you nothing but the discomfort of shrugging off your privilege, to acknowledge any of these truths. Thank you for showing me that even that shrug is a bridge too far.

Until now, I have presumed that your decisions meant that you actually cared about the people about whom you were deciding. Your recent interview tells me that that was a mistaken assumption on my part. My bad. I won't do it again. 

Regards,

Me