Given this history, it should come as no surprise that growing numbers of people are working to defund the police and reimagine justice. Our nation has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. More than 95 percent of arrests every year are for nonviolent offenses like loitering, fare evasion and theft. Some are arrested for selling loose cigarettes (which resulted in Eric Garner’s being choked to death by the police) or minor forgery (which resulted in George Floyd’s being suffocated to death by the police).
People are right to wonder — is this justice? Can’t we design alternative approaches to poverty, drug abuse, mental illness, trauma and violence that would do less harm than police, prisons, jails and lifelong criminal records? Fortunately, the extraordinary protests sweeping the nation and the globe are beginning to have an impact. The Minneapolis school board unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday to stop using police officers to provide school security, citing the department’s culture of violence and racism. And on Wednesday, the mayor of Los Angeles announced that city officials may cut up to $150 million from the city’s police budget “so we can invest in jobs, in health, in education and in healing.” By Friday, the Minneapolis City Council president announced that the council was preparing to “dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.” These developments reflect a long-overdue paradigm shift in our approach to race and criminal justice.
We must fight for economic justice. We cannot achieve racial justice and create a secure and thriving democracy without also transforming our economic systems. James Baldwin knew this back in 1972 when he wrote:
“The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world’s present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and finally that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain.”
Dr. King understood this reality even earlier, noting in a letter to his wife in 1952 that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness” and later urging his staff to move beyond civil rights to human rights and democratic socialism. W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P., became a socialist and gave a speech sponsored by the Wisconsin Socialist Club in 1960 noting: “Many of us believe and hope that socialism will and must come to this land. We see no other way.” Before that, a host of other prominent people we revere embraced democratic socialism too, like Albert Einstein, Helen Keller and Paul Robeson. Einstein published an essay in 1949 titled “Why Socialism?” in which he states: “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils [of capitalism], namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.” We celebrate these people as heroes today, yet we’ve been encouraged to forget that they all believed we must move toward some form of socialism.
No matter what you think about Bernie Sanders as a man or as a candidate — and I wish he was much better at addressing racial issues like reparations — we all owe him and countless organizers a debt of gratitude for pushing universal health care, paid family leave, free college education, a $15 minimum wage and many other economic rights into the mainstream. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has explained, the coronavirus crisis proved that Mr. Sanders was right all along — that health care and other economic rights should be considered part of our social contract, not special benefits for those who are lucky enough to be employed by companies that grant discretionary benefits. Nobody would have benefited more from Mr. Sanders’s political revolution than black people, and yet the generational divide among black voters affected his campaign.
Younger black people seem to understand that the neoliberal Democratic politics of the past will not take us where we need to go, and they supported Mr. Sanders by significant margins in polls. We must work to create an economic system that benefits us all, not just the wealthy. If our nation was not so deeply divided along racial lines — and if so many white people were not revolted by the idea of their tax dollars helping poor people of color obtain education, housing and social benefits — we would most likely have a social democracy like Norway or Canada. Achieving economic justice requires we work for racial justice, and vice versa. There is no way around it.
If we fail to take these obvious steps, our democracy will remain in peril even if Mr. Trump is defeated in November. Police killings, uprisings and riots will remain a recurring feature of American life. The black-white economic divide is as wide today as it was more than 50 years ago. And the same divide-and-conquer tactics that were used to prevent multiracial alliances for economic justice in the 1800s and 1900s were employed yet again in 2016 with spectacular results, as white Americans fearful of losing political power because of profound demographic changes elected a former reality show billionaire to the presidency, a man who unleashed racist tirades against immigrants on the campaign trail and vowed to “make America great again” by taking us back to a time we supposedly left behind — perhaps the time of civil war. Unless we choose a radically different path now, our persistent racial divisions and oppressive political and economic systems may unravel our democracy sooner rather than later.
Frankly, I find it difficult to call our nation a “democracy” in light of the rampant voter suppression, the denial of voting rights to millions of people with felony records and our pay-to-play political system that allows billionaires and corporations to more or less buy politicians and elections. But if you’re tempted to believe that voting Mr. Trump out of office isn’t urgently necessary in November because the system is already rigged, please read Astra Taylor’s book, “Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Sure Miss It When It’s Gone.”
Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. In recent days, we’ve seen what it looks like when people of all races, ethnicities, genders and backgrounds rise up together, standing in solidarity for justice, protesting, marching and singing together, even as SWAT teams and tanks roll in. We’ve seen our faces in another American mirror — a reflection of the best of who we are and what we can become. These images may not have dominated the media coverage, but I’ve glimpsed in a foggy mirror scenes of a beautiful, courageous nation struggling to be born.
Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
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