Allan Warren
This feature runs in our current February/March 2019 issue, which reflects on our most popular published work, James Baldwin’s 1962 essay “A Letter to My Nephew.” We turned to some of the nation’s leading thinkers and social justice leaders to ask how we must reckon with prejudice of all kinds to make a society that serves us all.
CARMEN PEREZ-JORDAN
National Co-Chair, Women’s March; Executive Director, The Gathering for Justice
In America, we incarcerate far more people than any other country on the planet. People who are or have been incarcerated are treated as The Other in our society because we pretend that they deserve everything they get.
I’ve worked inside prisons for close to twenty years, with people who have committed crimes, including violent crimes, because I believe people are more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. Most are victims of violence long before they find themselves in the justice system. Often they are there for reasons related to poverty, drug dependency, and lack of access to services.
Incarcerated people are treated as The Other because we pretend that they deserve everything they get.
And when people get out, the shadow of incarceration follows them forever. At least seventy million Americans live with an old criminal conviction that can keep them from jobs, housing, educational opportunities, and other things necessary to their economic security and family stability. Denying people the opportunity to earn an honest living, support their children’s development, and contribute to society undermines the health and safety of communities.
It’s time to remove the barriers that hinder reintegration and create a permanent second-class of citizens. We must build an alternative system based on compassion, personal responsibility, and community restoration.
FELICIA WONG
President and CEO, The Roosevelt Institute
Being Othered in America has always been about who has power in our society and who doesn’t. One problem, perhaps the problem, is that power is invisible to those who have it. James Baldwin, in 1962, said to his nephew in a letter published in these pages: “Your countrymen don’t know that [your grandmother] exists, though she has been working for them all their lives.”
Some people in America have always been left behind. Much of today’s status quo—endemic racial inequality, workers with no power on the job—is due to generations of exclusionary rule-writing—rules written by someone who doesn’t have to live according to the worst of his dictates.
Some people in America have always been left behind. But democracy demands more.
But democracy demands more. We can rewrite the rules so that they bake justice into the workings of the economy. Our tax code must discourage profligate extraction. Companies must be required to consider the well-being of all stakeholders—including workers, vendors, and community members. We must demand that our schools are integrated by race and class, and that public higher education be provided to all.
The irony of freedom, that great American value, is that it is not actually individual. People who live in walled countries or gated neighborhoods are not free. Baldwin said, plaintively but straightforwardly, to his teenage nephew: “We cannot be free until they are free.” Free communities have the power to write rules.
CHRISTINE NEUMANN-ORTIZ
Executive Director, Voces de la Frontera
I have been called racial slurs in Alabama. I have been questioned about my immigration status at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I can never forget the state legislator in Madison, Wisconsin, who shouted at a mostly Latinx delegation from the immigrant rights organization I lead, “Are you illegals?”
My mother instilled in me pride in our Mexican culture and our family heritage, gifting me with a sense of dignity in the face of bigotry and ignorance. That foundation helped me understand that I am a part of a long history of collective struggle for dignity and justice.
When politicians use phrases like “illegal alien,” they continue a brutal current in our history.
When politicians use phrases like “illegal alien,” or call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, they continue a long, tragic, and brutal current in our country’s history, one that seeks to deny our common humanity. But the immigrant rights movement presents an alternative to the cruel politics of division.
My group has stood with union workers. We’ve fought for universal health care and full funding for public education. We have fought for a municipal ID that recognizes immigrants and transgender people. We marched with the Black Lives Matter movement, because in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Since 2016, local governments have passed sanctuary resolutions, law enforcement agencies have declared they will not help ICE separate families, and voters have elected bold pro-immigrant candidates. When we come together, we harness our power to undo the damage.
MAURICE MITCHELL
National Director, Working Families Party
Nearly sixty years ago, Baldwin told his nephew that white Americans are “trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” He’s still right.
America suffers from moral amnesia. Our enduring myth is that everyone is a product of their own industry, pluck, and courage rather than a consequence of histories, systems, structures, and markets. We cannot afford the luxury of that lie any longer, because we are a nation in crisis. We face a crisis of morals, of democracy, of capitalism, of climate, and of empire.
We experience crises differently depending on where we stand in the hierarchies of race, class, and gender.
We experience crises differently depending on where we stand in the hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Black bodies have been slung like prizes from trees in counties throughout this nation, and now we are caged in places like Fishkill, Sing Sing, San Quentin, and Angola. But we are all affected.
In the midst of these crises, the forces of organized money that control our country seek to amp up cynicism, diminish hope, and break down community. They want working and poor people to feel isolated. They want to deprive us of political agency.
Our only answer is Baldwin’s answer: to build solidarity, hold up a mirror to the body politic, and finally force our country to “cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.”