"Toward the Heart of Justice" Speech Part 2

Yesterday, on March 24, I had the honor of serving as keynote speaker for the Women's Diversity Conference (note: my bio info isn't updated) at Adrian College. This conference is a rarity in a conservative, rural Michigan town, spearheaded by a few courageous female staff and faculty members whose roles at the institution and community are to inform, enlighten, and challenge. There was a subversive quality to this conference--it was cool to be connected to it. Enjoy!  

Part 2 – Engaging Law & Politics  

So, what is it like to be a young, queer, Black, southern female lawyer working in Virginia on felon disenfranchisement (which I’ll explain more about shortly)? Well, it’s slow-moving, stressful, and humbling. It requires me to constantly adapt to my environment, navigate internal and external politics, and take well-calculated risks. Most of all, it forces me to deal with broader questions like whether and how engaging with power helps the people with whom I work, and systems which we need to collectively dismantle and re-build?

I want to address this fundamental question about strategically approaching powerful institutions in two parts to provide context to my current work. The first part is dissecting a myth prevalent in social justice circles. Often, it is posed this way—is it better to work on the “inside” or “outside” the system. I don’t think that this framing is complete.  The reality is that each of us exists within powerful institutions—we buy food within a capitalist economy, we make consumer decisions manipulated by the advertisement industry, we receive news generated by corporate media sources, and most important, we know and love people who not only wholeheartedly embrace these institutions, but we are closely connected to other humans who are integral to the perpetuation of these institutions—whom I call decision-makers and power-brokers.

Many of us are influenced, and exist within, powerful institutions even if we are actively resisting their forces. Some of us are re-shaping our relationships to these institutions by making intentionally choices that tip the balance of power. Therefore, the real issues that we encounter are not whether to work “within” or “outside” the “system.” Instead, the real issues are how we should we exist “inside” powerful institutions. To which degree should these institutions affect us? In my view, the existential problem for those who want to strive toward the heart of justice is how to engage with powerful institutions without being crushed.

The second part is how we can positively build alternative institutions, commonly described as “working outside the system.” Often this part is posed this way, lodged as a grenade against those seeking justice—“if you don’t like the current system and don’t have ideas about how to change it, shut up.” First, this rationale is nothing more than a silencing tactic that is designed to stifle critique and is no more productive in addressing problems that we face. Second, I want to defend speaking out, because expressing rage, sadness, grief, and excitement is important in itself, as serving as a mirror into the institutions that we create, and being healing to those who are airing their reactions.   

It is, nonetheless, critical that we work to build alternative institutions that more responsibly deal with power. And we have to remember that these alternatives are inspired by, and informed by existing institutions of power. Here, is where the most creative, fun, imaginative, and powerful work lives. We see people in the US doing this work all of the time—the Highlander Folk School that taught literacy and provided civil disobedience training during the popular Civil Rights Movement; the South Central Farm of the late 1990s, which was at a time the largest community garden and urban farm in the country, promoting greater and better food access; the explosion of Ithaca Hours and other local currencies in the last twenty years created to encourage neighborhood economies; and even the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which put democratic consensus  governance, an alternative to majority-rule governance, on the national map. This form of resistance is the site of many interesting cultural, social, economic and political experiments, equal in importance to resisting powerful institutions.

One of my favorite radical thinkers, Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, writes extensively about transformative possibility. In a 2010 interview, his interviewer asked why he has so much optimism about the future. 

Robin says, "It doesn't come from any abstract sense of hope. Nor does it come from any sense of denial about the political realities that confront us and the extent of power and how it works. It comes out of being a historian. There are so many historical examples of seemingly impossible circumstances in which we had these revolutionary transformations." 

Without vivid imagination, no positive future would ever exist.

I outline these frameworks because, like many other people, I try to work on both levels—intentionally engaging with powerful institutions, and affirmatively building alternative institutions that maintain healthier relationships with power. Likewise, my fellowship project tries to engage and build on these levels, creating possibilities beyond the law and electoral politics.

 Virginia is one of four states that forever strips citizens’ civil rights, including their right to vote, upon a felony conviction. This type of law is commonly referred to as “felon disenfranchisement.”In 2004, at least 377,000 people were estimated to be disenfranchised, or in other words, alienated from their natural civic and political rights borne from their status as US citizens. Most notably, disenfranchisement permanently carves out a fraction of the electorate, which is disproportionately people of color, working-class and poor, disabled, and likely queer/transgender-identified.  For example, about 55% of disenfranchised citizens in Virginia are African-American, which make up less than 20% of the state population.

In Virginia, the only way for disenfranchised citizens to restore their civil rights is through individual Governor petition. Only 1,000 people each year restore their rights, on average. There are ten eligibility criteria that eliminate or discourage many people from accessing the system. In the end, after jumping every hoop and climbing every ladder, the Governor may deny an application for any reason and no reason at all, with no appeal process.

Some criticize the system as being fundamentally broken, unfair, and inhumane. Others, like brilliant legal scholar, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argue that systems such as these are relics of bygone eras that expressly intended to deny full Black citizenship. I go even further to say that Virginia’s disenfranchisement system remains because powerful interests (cut across race and class lines) cannot maintain their democratic stranglehold if it is changed. I think that it is designed to silently kill the democratic dream.

My Equal Justice Works fellowship, the Virginia Rights Restoration Project, which I’ll call VRRP, is an initiative aimed at building long-term infrastructure to dismantle the existing system. VRRP’s specific goal is to engineer new, creative strategies toward the alternative of automatic restoration upon sentence completion, which was necessary after two hard-fought but lost campaigns to pressure previous Governors into changing the law.

The overarching strategy of the project is to “open the system up.” The prediction is the more it is forced to function the way it is purported to work, the harder it is to sustain, because as the system must accommodate to provide greater access, and more people can access it, the sooner its insidious discriminatory purpose becomes clear. It will transform—the uncertainty is merely when and how.

Specifically, VRRP has a three “micro-strategies” designed to add pressure to the system. They consist of direct service and direct-action strategies, disabling strategies, and dismantling strategies, though, in actuality, it is only the accumulation of these approaches that can lead to change. At nearly the six-month mark, community members and I have distributed over a 1000 rights restoration guides, setup rights restoration clinics and clinic programs across the state including at five colleges,  begun building a grassroots strategy with state organizers, forced the state government to surrender data revealing the law’s significant impact, facilitated greater access through document translation, and challenged long-standing beliefs through legal research that the only avenues to change is by Governor executive order or constitutional amendment. There is much more to do, particularly as we are in the midst of forming a litigation strategy to better position grassroots forces. Nevertheless, VRRP’s intention is to form a praxis, on which to aggressively engage the law and politics in our favor.

In a more concrete sense these strategies mean that I receive a lot of phone calls from people who need help, which I happily answer. I end up in various law libraries throughout the Commonwealth, digging through microfiche, which is fascinating.  I find myself facilitating webinar trainings on Saturdays, which I gladly do. And I come up with a dozen ideas about things to try each week, of which one might be worth looking into.

Sometimes I find myself doing unexpected things. For example, I’ve been assisting a person named Tony Suggs with a pardon application for several months. A pardon is a request to the Governor to officially “forgive” a person for a crime or criminal history. Tony had his rights restored in 2006, and helped my organization during our previous campaign. Now he hopes to work in the local school system as a coach to fulfill his passion to mentor young people headed toward the criminal system. Though a pardon far from guarantees that he can overcome the school system’s rigid rules about hiring people with felony convictions, it will greatly increase his chances.

Tony’s story is unique and the kind that receive “official forgiveness” from the state. He suffered from severe physical and sexual abuse as a young child. At age 10, his parents abandoned him and his younger brother in the family home, forcing them to go hungry. His father eventually put him to work packaging his dope, and soon he founded himself in the street life. But rather than being an anonymous addict, he evidently was a boxing prodigy. He became the top ranked boxer in the world (in his weight class) and favored to win Gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Throughout his ascent, he struggled to fight his addiction, and lost control upon losing his first child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He was a qualifying match away when he was re-arrested for probation violation, after he failed the mandatory drug test. In Tony’s mind, he lost everything. He voluntarily entered rehab after his jail stint, got clean, addressed his emotional pain with support groups and therapy, and lives very differently. For over twenty years he has been a devoted father of Little Anthony, surrogate father to his brother’s six children, an active church member, and community mentor. It has been important for me to learn Tony’s story, and work with him on his petition. Although I never intended to complete pardon petitions through VRRP, its personal meaning to Tony is a radically political act.     

But let’s take a step back for a moment to examine law as a powerful institution. Can the law really help disenfranchised citizens? [Why?] An underlying assumption of my fellowship project is that it can, yet it is an assumption that I question every day. Ultimately I believe, as many radical lawyers do, that the law can only play a limited role in its own self-correction.

Law, as an institution, is a difficult place to engage with power for numerous reasons. As legal scholar and activist, Dean Spade, Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, explains how social movements are affected by their over-reliance on legal institutions, his essay, “For Those Considering LawSchool”:

“Most legal work maintains systems of maldistribution, it does not transform

them…Very often, legal change that emerges in these moments heavily compromises the demands of grassroots movements in ways that end up providing symbolic victory and possibly a small amount of material change to the least vulnerable of the group who the demands were about, but leave most people the same or worse off. US law is fundamentally structured to establish and uphold settler colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism---the legal system will not dismantle these things. The idea that people who want to make change will make the biggest impact by becoming lawyers and bringing precedent-setting lawsuits needs to be released in the face of what movement history reveals.  Once you let go of that idea, you can start to think about what role lawyers should or could have in social movements and evaluate whether you see yourself in those roles.”

Dean Spade is largely responding to decades of landmark civil right victories for LGBT people. For example, even as laws like the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 are enacted, LGBT and queer violence continues to be as ruthless as ever, particularly for queer/trans, working-class and poor people of color who are already systemic targets of institutional abuse by police, courts, and prisons. Law doesn’t solve these problems but can bolster the positions of broad-based movements that, as Dean Spade believes is historically effective, of making demands that exceed the law. His advice to understand our roles as people engaging with law-making institutions extends not only to prospective law students but to any person wishing to enter electoral politics.

Within the institution of law lies perhaps the most controversial institution at the moment: electoral politics.  The optics of electoral politics may seem counterintuitive to justice-seekers because it is about maintaining power with, and over others, without full acknowledgement that it is the very purpose of electoral politics. It can also be among the more challenging institutions to engage with as a person committed to collective justice because it is about individual, self-preservation of that power. It can prove difficult to align collective values with a desire to maintain a powerful position, from which a person can wield influence on the local, state, or national levels. I admire women and anyone else carefully trying to achieve this balance.

These tensions come up in VRRP. This year, for the first time, a white Republican lawmaker introduced an automatic rights restoration bill. I was excited because his interest in the issue changed the politics around a proposal that historically starts each year dead in the water. This lawmaker introduced a narrow proposal that would automatically restore voting rights for so-called non-violent offenders because, based on his calculations, it was the most politically palpable.  Before I learned about his bill I had “shopped” around the idea to other lawmakers about separating the two civil rights stripped by state law into separate bills. My rationale is if voting rights in the hot-button issue that stalled proposals year after year, then, why not sever the issues disenfranchised people could at least restore some of their rights, if passed. Sound reasonable? This was apparently an exceptionally bad idea. I was told that separating the issues would exhaust the limited political capital that existed for lawmakers to consider this issue. In other words, lawmakers would grow tired of making laws. The worst part was it was good advice, even though the bill died in subcommittee.

As a long-time legislative observer and one-time state lobbyist, I’ve seen legislators wishing to maintain a delicate balance between their self-preservation to maintain power and forceful advocacy to represent their beliefs. The entrenched political challenge of our time may be this: how do you peacefully and effectively govern diverse communities, states, and nations with others who hold fundamentally different values?

On one hand, there is the Barack Obama philosophy, which consists of forging consensus by finding common ground. On the other hand, there is Tea Party philosophy, which consists of abandoning all sense of self-preservation to govern according to rigid but sincerely-held principles. These philosophies are not left versus right—they are not even purely are purely ideological. I think that neither philosophy reflects the true nature of the problem because it is distorted by choices within a “winner-take-all” two-party system.

I believe that the main source of our present-day political tensions is between those who want to invest and nurture public institutions and those who want to demolish and undermine them. Developing a political agenda around protecting public institutions and organizing electoral support around this guiding principle has the potential to disrupt the prevailing status quo.   

My only other insight comes from popular education teacher and theorist, Paulo Freire, explained in his leftist classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that the cure to oppression is our own humanity. The heart of justice resides within our institutions: people. If we humanize our politics, we have hope for better government. Let me be clear. Humanizing politics is more than civil discourse. We see, after all, how collegial lawmakers respectfully cooperate to pass devastating laws that hurt other people and our natural environment, often in the name of economic prosperity. These politics are a false choice. The choice to humanize politics, in my mind, means measuring your actions against your values to sustain our collective well-being. These are moral struggles, which are entirely burdensome to take on for public scrutiny, but are utmost essential.

People who not only engage with, but enter into, electoral politics must be vigilant in noticing to the degree which they are being changed by the politics and politics are changing them. What are my values? Do these values promote collective well-being? Do I feel as if I have some control? Is this the most meaningful contribution to the world that I can make? These are questions that I ordinarily ask as a lawyer and political player, working in one of the most conservative states in the country. I think any person intentionally engaging in law and politics must worry about the direction in which she is moving—toward her heart of justice, or more distant.