“Color Blindness,”by Kevin Cooper.
Despite what certain people say and what many people actually believe, we do not live in a post racial society. This is especially true within America’s criminal justice system. What we do live in, however, is a society in which the highest court in the land refuses to accept or even acknowledge that racism exists. Because of this fact, most prosecutors and death penalty supporters continue to ignore laws designed to do away with racial discrimination by acting like racial discrimination doesn’t exist.
During the past 37 years, 80% of all persons sentenced to death have been executed for murders involving white victims, even though the number of white and Black persons murdered are virtually equal. This is a long standing and pervasive problem, in a sense, a historical fact. As long ago as 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled that reliable statistical evidence suggesting racial bias in the trial of any defendant could not be used to vacate a death sentence. Because racial discrimination permeates the judicial system, there is an over representation of minorities, especially African American on death row. [In] every state within this country that has a death penalty statute and African Americans racial bias continues to be a very serious problem within America’s pride and joy and its largest money maker, its criminal justice system and its prisons. But there is even a larger problem, and that has to do with the willfulness and lack of concern from people of power to fix this well known and dubious situation.
Here in the state of California, African Americans are about 6.7% of the state population. Black men are less than half than that 6.7%, since there are more females than males. Black men in this state are 36% of the state’s death row population. According to the NAACP Spring 2013, Death Row U.S.A. Report, of the 731 death row inmates on the state of California, there are 264 African Americans and only two females. The next largest group are whites, 257, and of those 11 are female. Then there are 173 Latinos, and of those five are female. There are 12 Native American males and no females on death row in the state of California. And finally, there are 25 Asians with two of them being female. These truths can never be truly dealt with and fixed as long as certain people continue to lie or ignore the truth about this ongoing racism. Color blindness will not exist within this criminal ‘just-us’ system until the day arrives when racism is a thing in the past, and that ain’t going to happen anytime soon. In struggle from death row, I’m Kevin Cooper.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
