Yesterday’s English class was very powerful to me. It was powerful in a sense because I know it’s something that has impacted people close to me. In our reading of Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy”, we’re following Stevenson’s career as a lawyer for those who’ve been falsely convicted or harshly sentenced. The book alternates between Stevenson’s experiences including the founding of his organization the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to the encounters of many of the different clients he’s tried to help. Walter McMillian’s story is the central focus of the book. Walter McMillian is a black man who was wrongly sentenced to death for a murder charge he didn’t commit. At this point in time, I’ve only read half the book and it’s already overloaded with so much emotion from the injustice that it’s at times infuriating.

Here’s are a few shocking statistics pulled from the book:

• “We [The United States] has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.”
• “One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison.”
• “One in three black male babies born this century is expected to be incarcerated.”
• “Black men are eight times more likely to be killed by police than whites.”

Additionally, Bryans Stevenson’s book has brought up many thought-provoking questions regarding the American justice system and ultimately argues that the system is too quick to punish and condemn when mercy is severely needed. “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” Perhaps the biggest question is why are people being judged unfairly? Is there a racial prejudice in these rulings or is it just a coincidental pattern?

We’ve also taken a brief look at Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”. In it, (or at least from what I’ve read) Alexanders outlines a new system of oppression among blacks in comparison to old Jim Crow laws has re-emerged in the form of mass incarceration. This can best be connected by another quote from Stevenson’s book. “Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. We’ve created laws that make writing a bad check or committing a petty theft or minor property crime an offense that can result in life imprisonment. We have declared a costly war on people with substance abuse problems. There are more than half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.”

I didn’t really intend on filling this blog post up with quotes but perhaps they say what I wanted to convey very effectively. I am a black man, and I understand that I live in a world where my people have been marginalized as a result of the figures above. I don’t want to sound so cynical but from the stories (the instances in history, books such as these, the frequent news reporting, accounts from my own family, etc.) knowing that these issues are still at large in the current year can sometimes be disheartening. At the same time, however, efforts from individuals such as Bryan Stevenson and the EJI, the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and current movements such as Black Lives Matter, shows that we’re not stagnant people and we are actually doing something about it. I look at people like Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey and more–those people have defied the odds against them. The only direction from here on is up.