Racism as practical application of the law
Law, through which society enacts its security and the individual obtains rights, is consciously aware of itself through the actions of its agents. Be they judges, civil servants, law enforcement, or any authorised party, the law is ever in flux at the point of its practical application. What turns statute into action is a chain of events and circumstances that flow through the interaction of citizens with Law’s agents. This practical application of the law, or the inverse non-application of the law, can depend heavily on factors of privilege and power dynamics, and this article focuses on the notion that racism to an extent flows from the practical application of the law.
Racism at its core is a systemic societal issue, where the balance of power lies with a white majority imposing their ability to practically apply the law onto ethnic minorities. This power imbalance impacts not just citizens of colour, but also agents of the state from those minority communities as it inflicts on all parties this notion that the law is both tailored to engender this power imbalance is applied unequally to people of colour. A classic example are stop and search policies. In theory these should impact the whole community, practically applied according to demographics in equality and equity. However, as is clear from both the UK and the USA, most police departments target people of colour disproportionately to white citizens. The practical application of the law thus becomes racist in application, though the legislation is putatively anodyne.
Weapons of Math Destruction details how this process flows from agents of the State directly enforcing codes, laws, and perceptions on communities, which in turn drive up crime statistics, arrests, and negative perceptions of the neighbourhood. If that same police force were to apply the same whip hand to affluent communities, and utilise the broken window theory that targeting low level crime prevents major crime, soon enough every parking ticket, fouling dog, and other petty infraction would lead to a surge in ‘crime’ within those neighbourhoods. Through inaction racism is perpetuated, as those affluent communities are majority white, and their crimes often go unnoticed and unlamented.
Applying the law equally is short and pithy, an ideal that should appeal to all of use, much as the idea that justice is blind and 12 good men and true on a jury. However, in practical application the Law trips up people of colour because it binds them in racist ideology and white prejudice. Unwrapping law from prejudice takes effort, learning, and communal understanding. It takes effort to say the police should step back from enforcing petty drug possession for black teenagers as they do for white middle class kids. It takes effort to clamour for enforcement of white-collar crime on the same level as crimes committed by working class communities. Indeed, when millionaire bankers bankroll high-end legal counsel in court, their sentences and penalties are significantly less than the impact their crimes have on the communities they impact. Most white-collar crime is white, yet the practical application of the law against them is cursory at best because society is more concerned with criminals of colour and of the working class.
This matters because it is perverting democratic law, and has done over the evolution of the common law in both England and the USA. Rights have always been ripped from those in power, and while equal rights regardless of skin colour have been on the lawbooks of both nations since the 1960s, the reality is the agents of the State fail to uphold those laws in equity. When people of colour and working class communities are ripped apart because the Law is used as a weapon it blights the whole of society. It blights because it tears at the very fabric of our youth, scything away generations of black and ethnic minority men and women who could enrich and strengthen us all. Racism is a cancer not just because it is hateful, but because it denies these men, and it disproportionately impacts young men, a future in which they can build something fulfilling. Every disaster, from the Titanic to the Holocaust, leads to questions of what the survivors could have done with their lives if they had but lived. The same is true of people of colour and working-class lives ensnared by iniquitous use of the Law.
This great tragedy is utterly avoidable, yet we citizens continue to elect lawmakers and accept agents of the State who enact and enforce these laws. The Law is not in aspic, it is through the will of the people that lawmakers change statutes, it is through juries that criminal cases are most likely tried. It is us citizens who apply and become agents of the Law, and it is us citizens who intersect with it on a daily basis. We have a moral obligation to speak out against injustice, for first they come for those who have no voice, then they strip rights from those who have them until there is no-one left to speak for you or I. By decrying unequal application of the law, not only do we fight the pernicious system injustices of racism, but we fight back against the stripping of any rights. We fight hard to get those rights, and we must fight hard to retain them.
Black lives matter in their totality not because of one man or woman’s death, but because they matter full stop. They have always mattered and will continue to matter. For the Law to truly be blind we must stop accepting unequal application of the law and face up to the fact it is on all our shoulders to bear the burden of uplifting those who face the brunt of this inequality. We must fight for equal application of the law, be that the practical application by the police or the inaction of the State in applying certain laws. If the Law is to truly be blind and those 12 good people serve is equity, it is up to us to take the first step.
