Like so many of us, I'm working as hard as I am able to elect Kamala Harris. It's gotta be done.
At every session of the UniteHERE phonebank, group leaders begin by going around the zoom restating why we are doing this work. For most all of us, it's some variant of "Donald Trump gotta go!"
Yesterday I posted about an affirmative reason that it seems worthwhile to do this work: Harris is proposing a plan for in-home elder care assistance through Medicare! This could ease the burdens and improve old age for so many.
Today I want to pass on someone else's heartfelt endorsement. Patricia Williams is a legal scholar, credited with helping develop that bugaboo of the right, critical race theory which identifies and examines the role of race in our system of law.
There's nothing abstract about why she is drawn to Harris as she recounts in an essay in the New York Review of Books. She notes that at Harris's Democratic National Convention, among the speakers were the survivors of that racist miscarriage of justice, the Central Park Five rape case. Irresponsible prosecutors, egged on by terrified New Yorkers led by Donald Trump, sent innocent young Black men to prison for the crime amid howls from tabloid newspapers.
... I attended the 1990 trial of those young men. I sat in that courtroom from beginning to end, and it was the saddest spectacle I have ever witnessed, dominated by fear-laced outlaw narratives that proved more powerful than reasoned evidence. It was an object lesson in how easily fact may be bulldozed and buried by passionate narratives of jumbled nonsense. The bottom line is that there was no physical evidence that linked any of the defendants to this very bloody crime. (The jogger lost 75 percent of her blood in the attack.) ...
Another man eventually admitted he had committed the crime, alone. Trump has never conceded that he pushed for a grotesque miscarriage of justice.
Williams continues:
... it is Harris’s consistently ethical track record as a senator and as a prosecutor upon which I base my deepest support for her. She has described the often difficult but necessary function prosecutors perform as officers of the court, and she has made clear her belief that a major qualification for public servants must be the ability to see beyond preconceived boxes.
She speaks of dealing with victims, families of victims, and perpetrators themselves; grieving mothers who lost children, whose deaths were not taken seriously, children of children whose trauma reproduces itself in yet more trauma inflicted; people who have served their time behind bars but are released back into the world with little more than a bus ticket and no job skills.
She has dedicated herself to reenvisioning homicides as more than mere statistics, more than deaths foretold, more than the humdrum inevitable outgrowth of stereotyped urban landscapes. Most importantly, in deciding when and how to bring charges in a case, she cautions that if you can’t see that random teenager walking down the street as a possible honor student, or “Tamir Rice [as a child] or Atatiana [Jefferson] as an auntie in her own home, it can have lethal consequences.”
We are all ethically required to “figure out the diaspora,” she said in an interview—years ago, as though speaking to Donald Trump in the present tense. “Your limited view of who people are—don’t put that on [them] because you don’t have the ability to see the variety and the diversity and the depth.”
This comprehensiveness of vision, this capacious balance of law and order and sanity and proportion, this disciplined command of human possibility, is what I hope we restore to our political landscape with her election. There is still a long way—if a very short time—to go.
For a good summary of the Central Park Five story, see the History.com.
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