A personal reflection on structural racism (Part 2)

In my last post I wrote about the different aspects of structural racism I learned about while studying in undergrad. This post is about what law school taught me that helped me understand why I was one of the only Black students in many of my courses. This post illuminates how laws ensured Black people would struggle to rise.

 

In Dred Scott v Sandford, the Supreme Court in 1857 held that black people were not citizens--they were property. Because they were mere property in the eyes of the law, Black people had no right to sue any one in an American court or be protected by any court's laws. The opinion is long and says a lot of horrible things including a description of different laws throughout the states that governed black people. The Court determined that these laws prove, "plainly to be misunderstood," that Black people were to occupy a lower position in society. In describing these laws, the Court states, 

They show that a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery, and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power, and which they then looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings... And no distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race.

The United States Supreme Court determined that laws were intended to erect a perpetual and impassible barrier between the black and white races. Since then, all the people responsible for these laws and for this ruling, of course, died. But, the same exact political system that came to this decision remains in place.

Moreover, once the Thirteen Amendment was ratified which made slavery illegal, except as punishment for a crime, none of the people who made any of these decisions justifying, ensuring, and upholding it were forced out of their positions or deemed unfit to govern. Since then, these people's children, grandchildren and great grandchildren have maintained decision making positions and upheld the spirit of the Dred Scott decision.

Dred Scott was obviously overruled eventually. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment claimed to guarantee citizens equal protection under the law. Throughout law school I have read decision after decision that shows just how little the government is actually interested in ensuring there is true equality.

I had learned about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education long before law school. I remember feeling a surge of pride looking at a picture of the plaintiffs' attorneys, Thurgood Marshall, George E. C. Hayes, and James M. Nabrit, in the textbook of my AP US History class during my junior year of high school. My teacher explained that this landmark case declared Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional and made a school like ours possible. I thought about the plight of Black people in America and how much genius and courage it took to get to that point. I felt incredibly proud to be black.

When I saw Brown v Board as an assigned case in my Constitutional Law II class I was excited to dive into the text of this decision that shaped my world. Imagine my surprise when I realized it took up only three pages of our casebook.  On top of this, it was tailored to apply to only public schools, meaning it did not even declare segregation as a whole as unconstitutional. There is no condemnation of previous holdings like Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson (which established the "separate but equal" doctrine used to justify segregation). Overall, it is a lackluster and halfhearted ruling that does nothing to highlight the incredible hard work of the many families that comprised the plaintiff side and the legal teams that strategically worked on this case for decades in advance.

In contrast, about a week later our class discussed Frontiero v Richardson, a case about women military members and the discrimination against them and their husbands when receiving benefits. In this case, the Court takes a strong stance against discrimination stating that because of the way women had been treated throughout history, their societal position was comparable to black slaves. The Court notes that Black people even held higher standing at a point because they gained suffrage first. Not only does this decision blatantly erase the existence of black women, the idea that white women held the same place in society as slaves at any point in time is honestly insane because they were literally slave owners.

If the lackluster language of the first Brown decision wasn't enough, when the Court reheard the case to decide how to remedy school segregation, they all but ensured nothing substantial would be done to rectifying the inequality they had previously guaranteed under the law. In the second Brown decision, one year later, the court stated that integration should happen "with all deliberate speed." This ambiguous ruling left enough room for anti-integrationists to ensure our school systems would remain segregated for as long as possible. In her article Schools are Still Segregated, and Black Children are Paying the Price, Emma Garcia explains that in 2020, over sixty years after the Brown decision, schools are still heavily segregated by race. She then discusses the many consequences this imposes on black students everywhere.

These are just a few examples of the ways I have learned about the structural racism embedded into our nation's legal make up. There are individual people making awful decisions that influence the student bodies at higher learning institutions. We see this in the guidance counselors we read about at both Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor's high schools, which is an awful and all too common reality for many first generation students. But there is also a far more sinister, hidden reason that our school's demographics are what they are. Our laws are permeated with numerous examples of the commitment to uphold white supremacy. In hindsight, I do not know why I even was that surprised that I was the only Black student in my section, even at Martin Luther King Hall.