Held to answer

They were young, male and they bore a terrible trauma on their souls.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? The Central Park Five?

In 21st Century America any disaffected male minority can lay claim to ancestral suffering to explain bad behavior.

Here in Oregon, the state Senate recently passed a bill requiring that any new legislation include a statement describing its effects on the racial and ethnic composition of prison inmates.

In other words, would the proposed legislation increase the number of racial and ethnic minorities in prison?

Each of us is a minority of one, but it’s group minorities that politicians and the media play to. It’s hard to keep track of the pecking order.

Early in the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, a CNN reporter described an alleged suspect as a “dark-skinned male.” Al Sharpton denounced this as “offensive, coded language” and claimed the reporter had turned every minority in Boston into a terror suspect. In Sharpton’s world, minorities only have dark skin. (For his purposes, however, he probably doesn’t consider Italian-Americans minorities.)

When the FBI released photos of the suspects, NPR’s Robert Siegel quickly noted that they were “not dark-skinned.”

And when the suspects were identified by name and ethnicity, NPR’s John Hockenberry hypothesized about whether “they were isolated as Muslims in America.”

Islam is one of the world’s major religions. Is it now equated with minority racial and ethnic status?

Such a fuss about race and ethnicity. Yes, it matters. No it doesn’t. Yes it does. No it doesn’t.

Had there been no bombing in Boston, the media’s race debate the past week might have settled on “The Central Park Five.”

Ken Burns’ documentary about the four black teenagers and one Hispanic convicted of raping a white Central Park jogger aired on PBS the day after the Boston Marathon.

The Central Park Five were convicted of rape, assault and attempted murder in 1989 after confessing and implicating one another. The victim, who was beaten into a coma, eventually recovered but remembered nothing of the attack.

Important to the story is the context of the times. Crime was so high, even the black community seemed happy to convict the teenagers. One of the saddest comments in the film is from a black man who says, “Many of us were frightened by our own children.”

These teenagers served years in the youth authority and in prison. Their convictions were overturned when a serial rapist and killer named Matias Reyes approached one of them in prison and volunteered that he raped the Central Park jogger.

Although the youths didn’t rape the jogger, they were elsewhere in Central Park that night, a scene of general mayhem.

As New York Times reporter James Dwyer says in the film, they were beating up other people when the jogger was being raped, but their attorneys declined to use that as a defense.

That might be why there has been no public outcry to settle the multimillion-dollar lawsuit the youths, now men in their mid-30’s, filed about 10 years ago. Burns hopes his documentary will help lead to a settlement.

“Race has been a central part of the America narrative whether people want to deal with it or not …,” Burns has said.

Americans most certainly deal with race – more than any other nation. (And we’re certainly not the only country with a history of slavery).

That’s why we end up with legislation like Oregon’s Senate Bill 463-A, which reflects none of the wisdom we should have acquired since the Central Park jogger case.

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), is white. In a press release from his office, he quotes statistics from the Oregon Department of Corrections that blacks make up about 2 percent of the state’s population but constitute 10 percent of prison inmates.

He recites other tired observations without digging any deeper: Blacks in Oregon are six times more likely to be in prison than whites, and nationally black men are more likely to be imprisoned than hold four-year college degrees.

Shields does not explore why blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes. He doesn’t want to know. He’s practicing a form of paternalism that has helped infantilize young black men. Shields would never call a young black man “boy,” but that’s how he treats them when he suggests new laws must cater to their special needs. They can’t be expected to obey laws like other people.

The bill was co-sponsored by state Sen. Jackie Winters (R-Salem), the only black in the Oregon State Senate and the wife of an ex-felon who later worked for Gov. Tom McCall.

Winters frequently invokes her late husband, Ted Winters. His story, though, is his story. His accomplishment would not be so extraordinary if it could be duplicated simply by tweaking the laws.

In proposing SB 463-A, Shields relies on similar laws passed in Iowa and Indiana. He quotes from the Sentencing Project in citing a familiar example of racism in criminal statutes: Federal laws that call for longer sentences involving crack cocaine (associated with black users) and shorter sentences involving powder cocaine (more popular with white users).

That worn-out example has a couple of problems. First, in the 1990’s, when I was a reporter in Southern California. I lost track of how many gang-related shootings I covered involving crack cocaine. Black crack dealers did more to destroy working-class black neighborhoods than white police officers. That might have something to do with why a disproportionate number of blacks ended up in prison on drug charges.

The second problem with that old example is that crack cocaine isn’t the issue it used to be – perhaps because of that federal statute? I don’t know, but white politicians should have learned something from the history of the Anti-Drug Act that led to the disparities between crack vs. powder cocaine.

The law was passed in 1988 in response to the death of college basketball star Len Bias. He was on his way to a glorious career when he overdosed on cocaine. The public demanded that something be done. It was as if politicians had to show they were not going to let another promising young black man overdose on cocaine.

Looking back on the law, critics scoff at the drug hysteria that accompanied Bias’ death, but they ignore why so many white Democratic politicians pushed for this law: They thought they were fighting racism and helping blacks.

Today. politicians like Shields and Winters seem to sympathize with drug dealers. What about the black parents and grandparents who tried to raise children when there was a black crack dealer on every corner trying to hook black kids on a cheap, dangerous thrill?

The black victims are invisible.

In his press release, Shields included a Web address for the Sentencing Project’s report. Read it, and you won’t even find the word “victim.”

Shields’ bill at least makes a passing reference to victims (buried in Line 22) – but only because he had to. His earlier versions dating back to 2009 did not.

If he and Winters really want to help black Oregonians, they should take the advice that U.A. Attorney General Eric Holder offered to the National Association of Black Journalists at its 2011 conference:

“When conversations center on the fact that African Americans are disproportionately jailed, you can ask why we aren’t also discussing the fact that black people are also disproportionately victimized by violent crime.”

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Good morning, Heartache