Criminalizing Communities

Criminal Social Status

Why is it ok, no, why is it legal, for police to look at my aunts and uncles, at my best friend from grade school, and to be able to ask for their papers on the spot? Why is it legal for them to live in fear, with essentially criminal status, their freedoms restricted, having been barred an easy path to citizenship, despite having lived in this country for years, working harder than most and making a positive contribution? Why is it legal for my cousins to be stopped by police more than necessary, simply for being Latino and low-income in Los Angeles? Why is it legal for low-income people of color to be stopped and subject to humiliating and degrading searches by police simply for being black and Latino in New York City? And why is it legal for entire communities to be so isolated from resources that youth have no option but to commit crime, becoming part of a culture that celebrates crime and criminals?

It is a criminalization of entire communities, and it is what the law endorses. Just like in Dudley v. Stephens, the law is part and parcel of, and a support to, a society that oppresses certain communities and groups of people for others’ gain. We criminalize low-income people of color, just like they prosecuted Dudley, to have somewhere to place the blame, to have an “evil” to juxtapose against the “good” that is the white, hardworking, civilized majority. It is in furtherance of a social hierarchy and the myth of an American Dream, the idea that low-income communities of color and immigrant communities are leeches of society, and therefore their continued oppression is valid. Propped up by this validation, we can continue to exploit these communities, ignoring their needs, stripping them of dignities and freedoms, and allowing them to work in our service as they attempt to escape their condition.

The Law: Status Quo vs. Justice

This is a natural function of the law when it is seen in its role in the wider society – the law has a role of upholding and maintaining the status quo, of legitimizing its institutions and mores. However, this function of the law flies in the face of conceptions of justice. And it brings me to wonder about the place of justice in the law.

Working for change for these communities within the system that criminalizes them?

How can a system so engrained in the wider social system be used to uproot that system, to win justice for the communities that it has criminalized and oppressed? Can it be secretly ambushed, the fight for justice cloaked in the language and form of the mainstream, as Arnold would suggest? But can this be effective? Can a revolution really be made palatable to the status quo and to the perpetrators of?

Take Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., the federal class action challenging New York City’s Stop and Frisk program. As sympathetic as plaintiff Floyd is, a young black medical student, will the law really be able to name as criminals the defendant police officers and the city of New York, or will it continue to hold as criminally suspicious the act of being person of color? Can the system really turn itself around in this way? When a law, like the Fourth Amendment’s reasonable suspicion requirement, can be construed in virtually any way, the law doesn’t seem to matter so much as those who are in power and who will be deciding how to construe it. And justice seems to be at their whims. And can a society and a legal system whose whims have recently demonstrated an ill favor toward the continued need for affirmative action (See Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin) decide now that the treatment of people of color by police is unlawful, going against the well-established practice of criminalizing these communities?

-- XochitlRodriguez - 08 Apr 2013