Delaware’s slaveholding past impacting black lives today
Some would suggest that Delaware’s criminal justice system is broken. I would suggest the system is functioning in the way that it was designed to function more than three centuries ago. Laws and their enforcement were established by the white power structure to serve its own interests consistent with the system of enslavement. Like so many in our black community, I believe little has changed.
The time has come for us to break the chains of a system that has been run by Delaware’s dominant white culture for its own benefit and to the detriment of people of color. The overwhelming majority of people occupying prison spaces, facing police brutality, and sentenced to death in Delaware are black and brown, even though we are just a fraction of the population. State leaders must summons the political will to address criminal justice reform in a way that refutes the idea black bodies and black humanity are not important.
We have grown tired of waiting for the system to do the right thing. Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never did and it never will”. Black people in Delaware are demanding there be equality in the law’s application and - pardon the phrase – in its execution. When it comes to people of color in urban spaces, Delaware investigates too much, prosecutes too much, incarcerates too much, and sentences minorities to death too much.
We are demanding a system that treats black people with the same respect and regard as white people are treated. We must admit the existence of an almost xenophobic fear of black folks that makes it possible for people in authority – customarily white folks – to racially profile, to commit police brutality, and to over-investigate. We have to change the lens through which African-American people are viewed in Delaware.
We are not savages. We are human and productive members of society who have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As people of color, the system doesn’t always afford us that right.
We know this because, on any given night, one can go to the University of Delaware campus and other predominantly white institutions and see the same type of activities taking place that black people are being arrested for on their front porch. Those in authority are not arresting white college students in mass numbers.
Instead, our state is spending more every year on prisons than it does on higher education; prisons to immobilize another generation of black men. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested that budgets are moral documents, meaning that wherever we invest our resources shows where our morality lies. Delaware’s priorities suggest we have already thrown away black people - relegating them to the prison system rather than investing in them to be productive members of society.
As we recently discovered during the third in our series of town hall meetings, those in power still see things through the lens of patriarchy, white supremacy and white privilege. Every time we wanted to address something that made those in authority uncomfortable, they did not want to talk about it, as if real progress comes with hiding behind sanitized phrases and comfortable nomenclature. If we are to make progress, those in charge must address the racist system that continues to oppress black people in Delaware. It will require honest, and sometimes impolite, conversations about race.
White progressives and liberals, for example, are complicit in the problem because they do not always see themselves as a part of the problem. They express sensitivity to black cause, participate in urban outreach, but then are able to escape into their white worlds without effectuating necessary structural changes. They can no longer merely acknowledge the system is broken and confess that we can do better. We do not want empathy, we want action. We must erect a new system that is fair, equal, and just, for everybody.
Repealing the death penalty is a good place to start. With the vast majority of death sentences being brought against people of color, capital punishment has become a symbol of the broader race and criminal justice problems in Delaware. Ending the death penalty is something those in power can do right now to show there is a value to black lives.
Until change begins in earnest, Delaware’s criminal justice system will simply continue to do what it has done from the start, serve the masters of the system, while the raw material of that system – poor black and brown people - continue to grow in anger.
The Rev. Dr. Donald Morton is the Executive Director of Delaware’s Complexities of Color Coalition.