Dear Dr. Hahn (Tina Marie)
In response to your comments, I believe the pressure for justice arises disproportionately among the impoverished because they (we) see so little of it that we think it is that it appears to be reserved for others. This attitude activates a huge hostile enzyme that connotes all interaction with the larger society as negative. This negative orientation feeds itself, like a strange fruit and where the public perception of non-white individuals and communities has been one-sided and racially biased. If you study the evolution of RAP music in the mid 1980's for a decade, you will find large groups of individuals who have been poorly educated (illiterate), marginally nurtured, under-employed, disregarded from the work force and generally described without a future. Rap music promotes comfort in their words - words that are images of their own reality. Words that tell it like it is. These images represent a long epitaph, wrapped up in having been judged as the unwashed poor. Justice for them means not getting caught - the presumption of which is that they are going to find themselves doing something illegal - because that is the only justice left for them. The system has disregarded people of color for a long time. Finally, there are now hand-held cameras that show - unequivocally - the burden of life in the United States. A police officer in South Carolina was fired for excessive force, after the video captured him shooting the individual 8 times. I wonder if outcomes would be different by insisting females are the only police investigators conducting criminal inquiries for rape or sexual assault.
Twenty years ago, I would have laughed if someone had told me an African American would be elected President of the United States in 2008. Twenty years earlier, Fannie Lou Hammer was finally seated at the Democratic Convention (1968) after a bitter fight with then Vice President Lyndon Johnson over empowerment and the right to vote for African Americans. Poverty, wrapped in a racially biased blanket, results in freezing cold conditions. So if I steal, so what? I am already in jail. No options, no future! Will be lucky if I live to be 25 years. Addressing the structure of trauma-informed policies and procedures is the best way to assist our local communities (and their governmental structures) have more equitable impact. Continuing to punish the poor is the order of the day. Sadly, however, you cannot reason someone out of a position they have not been reasoned into. Justice must be balanced - both for the individual and society. Equity should be able to be accomplished and all of us need to fee we have equal opportunity.
Paul B. Simms