Erich — I was humbled by the tone of your response and will follow suit.
Yes, you are correct. I agree with you. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, creed etc.
While I agree, “You can argue that the laws may not be uniformly enforced…” I disagree with, “this is being fixed” and strongly disagree with, “maybe not fast enough for some people.”
I begin with Alexander Hamilton who contends that law and enforcement are an inseparable idea, then warns of the consequences of separating law-making from enforcement.
“Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow.”
While Hamilton lost this war of ideas, his warning proved prophetic. Instead of a nation of laws where NO man is above the law, they created a justice system that placed some people above punishment. Unfortunately, those who are above punishment, are also above the law. Creating a class of people above punishment, guaranteed the law would be applied un-evenly; falling harshly on some people and not at all on other people.
America’s entire political system turned its attention away from meaningless laws, to gaining power over others, through enforcement that asks: Who will be held accountable to the law, and to what degree? Two students were found guilty of rape; one student got 6-months in jail and the other student got 25 years in prison. The law was irrelevant; all that mattered was the question of enforcement — who was and was not above punishment.
You say “our existing laws are not always duly enforced…” and I say that is because people who are above punishment, are also above the law. That is the reason “mandatory-sentencing” failed. Simply put, the legal system could not sustain itself, when the law was applied evenly. In other words, when enforcement suddenly applied to them, the rich and powerful fought it tooth and nail.
Case in point: The Civil Rights Act separated the law from enforcement. As a result, states were free to enforce those laws — or not. Only in 1975, when Congress added enforcement measures did the right to vote, serve on juries, access public spaces, etc. become the law of the land. For the next 38 years, those enforcement measures were challenged continuously.
You say “this is being fixed” and I disagree. In 2013, the Supreme Court overturned those enforcement measures and states immediately began re-instituting discriminatory voting practices.
When you say, “…maybe not fast enough for some people.” I strongly disagree, because… Voting rights are just a tiny part of our gigantic justice, social, educational, financial, civic and political systems. I honestly believe that the dysfunction and corruption that infects every one of those systems is grounded in the separation of laws and sanctions. Our founding father’s hypocrisy taught us to justify our own, individual hypocrisy as well.
I’ve tried, Erich, I’ve really tried. But the more I study our country’s history, the more I discover racism at our core. Sadly, it seems the financial rewards of slavery proved more powerful than our founding fathers’ integrity and moral grit. They left us lofty principles, and systems that excused people like themselves, from those principles. The consequences have come due.
Of the 2.3-million Americans in prisons today, white people are the largest group — by far. As Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote of Nazi Germany: “Then they came for me / And there was no one left / To speak out for me.”
Your turn. :)
