"The Color of Justice"

In the third chapter titled “The Color of Justice”, Michelle Alexander

mainly discusses how courts make it legally difficult for people of color
to challenge their prosecutors in terms of racial bias. Alexander appeals to
logos by providing logical evidence of racial injustice in court cases as well as
through statistics. Alexander also appeals effectively to pathos with personal
anecdotes of victims of racial discrimination.

Alexander’s argument is very persuasive. She uses numerous cases and their
outcomes as clear and compelling evidence for her claim. The main case
Alexander uses for support is McCleskey vs. Kemp. Warren McCleskey faced the
death penalty for killing a white police officer in an armed robbery. He challenged
his sentence on the grounds of racial bias, appealing to the fourteenth amendment,
which grants equal rights to African Americans, and the eighth amendment, which
prohibits arbitrary punishment. The Supreme Court rejected McCleskey’s claim
saying that there is no clear and explicit evidence of racism. Therefore, covert
racism, if not admitted to, was deemed constitutionally acceptable.

 

McCleskey vs. Kemp is the most notable of the court cases mentioned in this
chapter to me. McCleskey provided a significant amount of statistics indicating
that racial discrimination existed in criminal justice, which I personally found
very compelling. Apparently, black men accused of homicide are 4.3 times more
likely than white men to be sentenced to death (110). I am not ignoring that
McCleskey killed someone, and I do think he deserves to be punished, but I found
the disparity between the number of blacks and the number of whites sentenced to
death persuasive. 70% of black people convicted of murder are given the death
penalty compared to 19% of white people convicted of the same crime (110).
This is by no means fair and is clearly (at least in my eyes) evidence of racial bias,
and with my interpretation of the fourteenth and eighth amendments,
this seems very much unconstitutional.

Alexander used many statistics to prove her point about racial discrimination in
law enforcement and the courts. The most impactful stat she used, in my opinion,
if that “ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user while only
5 percent imagined other racial groups” when asked to envision and describe a
drug user (106). I found these numbers astounding, and I tried to imagine my own
stereotypical drug user (with little success because I was already influenced by
what I had read and was thinking too much about race).

  
Although I am generally a statistics-and-numbers-kind of person, I found
Alexander’s appeal to pathos more persuasive. Throughout the book (so far)
Alexander has used a lot of anecdotes. In fact, she starts her book with one.
This chapter is no exception. The chapter starts with two anecdotes,
the first about Erma Faye Stewart. Stewart is a black mother of two arrested in a
drug sweep in Texas. She is innocent. However, after a month in jail and in
desperate need of childcare, she takes a plea bargain. She is sentenced to ten years
of probation, ordered to pay 1,000 dollars of fines, and branded as a felon. The
felon label got her evicted from public housing which resulted in her children
being taken away from her. The second is the story of Clifford Runoalds.
Runoalds went to Texas to attend the funeral of his eighteen-month-old daughter
when he was arrested for drug crimes. He was held in jail for a month, pleading
his innocence, before charges were dropped and he was free. However, he’d lost
his apartment and job, as well as the last opportunity to see his daughter before she
was six feet under.

Compared to the first two chapters, I found these stories more persuasive because
the people in these stories were actually innocent. Don’t get me wrong, I think that
bias’ effect on police searches is horrible, but the only stories (at least that I
remember) involved the police actually finding drugs even though they didn’t have
probable cause. Although I agree that the officers’ motives were wrong, I think that
possession of cocaine and other illegal drugs also isn’t good. [However, I did find
the 57 Bus a powerful book (and a true story), and although one of the main
characters, Richard (who set the skirt of an agendered person on fire) was guilty, I
still felt bad for him and his situation in court. Richard faced some issues in regards
to race because he was also black. Although Richard did something absolutely
horrible, he was actually one of my favorite characters and I found him kind of
sweet.] When the people in the stories are completely innocent and lose so much
just because they were suspected due to the color of their skin, it strengthens the
impact of the story. Before I was conflicted because the police officers used what I
think are unconstitutional methods but also the person of color being searched did
possess drugs. Examples without actual drug users make the injustice of racial
discrimination in law enforcement more apparent because no crime was committed.

Beyond her rhetoric, I preferred this chapter over the first two. First off, Alexander
addressed the issue of implicit bias, which in my experience is the more common
form of racism. I have yet to meet someone who is overtly racist, so (although she
provided good evidence) I had trouble believing the purposeful use of criminal
justice to oppress black people. The more I read, the more I realize that truly,
explicitly racist people are out there. It is disheartening, but I guess it is our reality.
At least where I live and with the kind of people I interact with, subconscious
racial bias is far more common.