Conrad Black writes Eric Garner’s America in The National Review.

Excerpts:

African Americans must not imagine that, even though they may be the principal and most frequent victims of the police and prosecution and court and prison systems of the United States, at least on a per capita basis, they are the only group that is victimized. So, more frequently than others would imagine, are wealthy or highly placed whites, such as Martha Stewart, industrialist Alfred Taubman, Scooter Libby (former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney), and the late seven-term U.S. senator Ted Stevens. Hispanics, native people, Asians who are not conspicuously wealthy, and poor whites do not fare appreciably better than African Americans, and everyone in the United States, from the president and the wealthiest and most admired citizens down, is, in some measure, a victim of this now terribly warped justice system. No one is safe and everyone pays for it. The legal cartel is riveted on the back of the country like a horse-leech and extracts $1.8 trillion a year from the American economy as the legislators and regulators add 4,000 new measures with weighty sanctions each year, for the delectation of their confrères at the bar. At any time, 1 percent of the entire adult population is incarcerated, at a cost of about $150 billion annually and usually in unconstitutionally inhuman conditions; another 6 or so percent of all adults, male and female, are awaiting conviction (99.5 percent of those tried are convicted, an absurdly implausible number rivaled only by North Korea) or are under supervised release by often pettifogging probation officers at further great cost to the country. There are 48 million convicted felons in the United States, and even if decades-oldunstigmatizing offenses such as failing a breathalyzer or being disorderly at a fraternity party are omitted, this means that approximately 15 percent of American adult males are designated felons. This is an absurd and barbarous number achieved by equal-opportunity multiethnic injustice, albeit unevenly applied. It presents African Americans a chance to form an invincible coalition in whose victory they would be the principal winners.

HKO

The inability to see this beyond racial terms is the larger travesty. The supervising officer at the scene was black. Garner is very different from Brown.

Tag Archives

A Chance for a Coalition

Recent Posts

Recent Comments