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| Lynch on NPR again demanding an apology from De Blasio |
NYTimes | Who
is to apologize for bias in policing in general, and generations of
racially biased criminal justice, both of which have contributed to mass
incarceration?
This isn’t only about where the apologies should begin, but where they should end.
Sure,
we can search for ways to rationalize behaviors and responses, talking
about personal choices, culture, crime and family structures, but those
discussions mustn’t be — can’t be — separated from the context of
history and the confines of institutional structures.
Lift
that rock and all sorts of uncomfortable things come crawling out — a
privilege made possible by plunder and oppression, intergenerational
transfers of hopelessness bred by intergenerational societal exclusions —
truly ugly things.
We
have to decide what racial conciliation should look like in this
country. Does it look like avoidance and go-along-to-get-along
obsequiousness, or does it look like justice and acknowledgment of both
the personal parts we play and the noxious structural bias enveloping
us?
How is mutual understanding achieved without mutual respect being given and blame taken?
How do we reconcile ourselves to one another without the failures of the systems that govern us being laid bare before us?
It
seems to me, in the New York standoff, that the mayor owes no apology
for fighting to overturn stop-and-frisk, disclosing that he talked to
his son about encounters with police officers, or being compassionate to
protesters. That is the man New Yorkers elected.
This,
to my mind, is an attack on him as an agent of change. It is a battle
to see which arm has the most muscle: the one that wants to deny bias,
explicit or implicit, in the exercise of its power while simultaneously
clinging to that bias; or the one committed to questioning the power and
acknowledging the bias. Eventually, we will have to wrestle with the
question of which of those forces must win for us to be true and whole.
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