1]My colleague and good friend Kim Crenshaw has written an important essay in the New Republic that I am hoping you will share with your followers. Here is her conclusion: "These facts point us toward a troubling but essential fact: that the behavior of police inthe United States
2]has hardly been about law enforcement; its instead been about the protection of a very particular status quo. And that status quo is tied directly to the maintenance of the inferior status of Black people. It is a calculated legal institutionalization of white dominance that's
3]been kept in place for all of American history" I witnessed this oppression as a young Public Defender when I defended my minority clients in court and interviewed them in our jails and prisons. I then taught criminal law courses for almost 30 years in some of this nation's
4] best law schools. I tried to show my students the truth of Kim's conclusion in my teaching career by offering them examples of police racism. For the most part, I failed to persuade the majority of my students that institutionalized racism was a general feature of our law
5]enforcement system. While my minority students had lived this truth, most of my white students were only willing to accept specific examples[administration of death penalty] while rejecting the generalization of such examples. I hope that the BLM movement and scholars like Kim
6] prompt the majority of white Americans to finally see the truth and terrible consequences of this awful legacy. If so, perhaps they will do something to reform the system by voting for local district attorneys who are committed to changing our law enforcement system.
