Like the neo-Nazi’s Holocaust denial, like the neo-Confederate’s ‘there were happy slaves,’ the liberal’s ‘our court is flawed’ works to minimise racist atrocity.
Aljazeera | July 19, 2022
A judge in Louisiana said: “We have a n****r! It’s a n****r. Like a roach,” on a home video last year.
At their best, apologists for the US “justice system” will call the judge a bad apple and the legal system that produced her – the one she wanted to be a part of – flawed.
It is a perfect defence. An unbroken line of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous torture initiated by the courts – which kept Dred Scott in slavery, and kept Kalief Browder in slavery, which pushed the Indian off the southeast, and pulled Oklahoma from the Indian – is referred to, regretfully and with downcast eyes, as “an imperfect system”.
If all US judges shared home videos of themselves dehumanising Black people, tangoing while cleaving to Ku Klux Klan robes, and backslapping officials of a white nationalist political party they would be called bad apples. If 100 percent of all sentencing was proven to be consciously racially discriminatory, sentencing would be called flawed. And in this way the liberal view is able to protect white supremacy in action by representing it as always an aberration. Always, despite the preponderance of evidence, the protests and crying behind prison cell doors, despite all history, as being non-racist as a rule. A “justice system” that has not for one hour been anything other than an instrument of a racist rule is sold to its victims as always having non-racist potential.
