With a week to go before the election, the NAACP is expending a lot of capital, both political and financial, on what at first blush sounds like a good idea: a high-profile ad campaign for hate crimes legislation. A closer look, however, reveals that this campaign has more to do with the sordid realities of electoral politics than with waging the good fight for social justice.
It's like the old joke about the cop who comes upon a drunk crawling around under a streetlight. "What are you doing?" he asks. "Looking for my keys," the drunk answers. "Where did you lose them?" "Back at the bar." "Well, why are you looking for them here?" "Because the lighting is so much better."
This is the same muddled logic behind the NAACP's focus on hate crimes legislation. Like the drunk following the light, many African-American leaders, with a political investment in the Democratic party, follow any exploitable difference between Al Gore and George Bush -- leaving the real crises, like so many car keys, forgotten and far behind.
"This focus on hate crimes legislation is stunning and virtually inexplicable," civil rights leader and president of TransAfrica Randall Robinson told me. "How can this be as important as incarceration rates, prison building, the inequities of the drug war, the private prison industry? Yet hate crimes legislation is taking priority over all these troubling trends that affect millions of African Americans."
I asked NAACP chairman Julian Bond why hate crime legislation had been moved to the front burner, ahead of more urgent needs. "I grant you that hate crimes legislation is a smaller matter," he replied, "but if there had been hate crimes legislation, all three of the men who dragged James Byrd to death would have been put to death in Texas." "But you don't even believe in the death penalty," I pointed out. "That's right, I don't," he answered.
Such are the contortions of venerable political leaders when partisan politics -- in this case, inflating the importance of an issue on which there is a clear difference between Bush and Gore -- takes precedence over the fundamental interests of their constituents, consistently ignored by both candidates. This is not to say that we should oppose hate crimes legislation. It's rather that expending political capital on it is a sleight of hand that gives the impression of doing the right thing for the most vulnerable while, in fact, they continue to be, at best, abandoned and forgotten, at worst locked up and forgotten.
Seventy-four percent of those jailed for drug offenses are African Americans, and we're incarcerating black men at eight times the rate of white men. Indeed, the total number of blacks in state prisons has doubled on the watch of a Democratic administration, and the heady novelty of being "tough on drugs" shows no sign of wearing off. But it's hard to draw distinctions between the presidential candidates on these injustices since both of them are equally culpable of refusing even to address them.
It's no wonder that young African-American activists are increasingly disenchanted with the old guard. "We work with low-income people of color all day, every day," says Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which works to reform the criminal justice system. "And all I hear about is bad schools, police harassment and brutality, and the appalling racial bias of the drug war. Anybody who came around trying to get people marching and excited about stopping 'hate crimes' would have a really, really tough sell. I just can't believe the NAACP is pushing so hard for this."
What is hardly mentioned in this debate -- or the NAACP's expensive ad campaign -- is that 45 states already have hate crimes legislation. And so far, these laws have been a blunt weapon wielded disproportionately against those they were designed to protect. Sound familiar?
"It is demonstrable," says Christopher Plourd, a criminal defense lawyer who has represented a number of clients charged with hate crimes, "that these laws hit the poor and minorities hardest. It wasn't meant that way, but that's the way it is." In Los Angeles, for instance, more than half of the hate crime charges filed in 1999 were filed against minority defendants.
"We already have too many mechanisms for arbitrary sentence-enhancement," Jones says, "which cops and district attorneys invariably overuse against people of color. In the same way that they don't go on white college campuses trying to enforce drug laws but come to the 'hood, they'll use these new hate crime laws against the NAACP's own constituents."
With 88 percent of blacks voting Democratic in the last election, an increase in black turnout could be the difference between victory and defeat for Gore. But even with this political trump card up its sleeve, the NAACP leadership has made no demands from Gore on drug policy reform -- like calling a halt to the wholesale jailing of young people of color, doing away with draconian mandatory minimums or appointing a drug czar who'll put the emphasis on treatment rather than incarceration. In fact, the NAACP is spending $9 million on an unprecedented effort to get out the black vote for a candidate who hasn't said a word about policies so clearly detrimental to these voters.
Instead of upping the ante on issues that affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of African Americans, they've been bluffed into bashing Bush on hate crimes legislation -- turning a winning hand into just another squandered opportunity.
Copyright © 1998 Christabella, Inc.
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