Out of the mouths of youth: There is no justice.

I love my GA job. Interacting with youth that are in the process of finding their way through college and life itself is a blessing all its own. Though there are troubling moments when not even I have a viable solution to their challenges, I most enjoy our conversations where I learn about them, which usually leads to philosophical dialogues that get at bigger pictures and ideas. Of course, I am there to listen and question, but sometimes I wish I had said things that really get them to thinking, the way my favorite mentors do from time to time.

Recently, among a group of students, the matter of our justice system came up as it pertains to Michael Brown and especially Eric Garner. Not even I was aware to how much these students rely on social media like Twitter and Tumblr to get an accurate read of these situations and public responses to them. I shared in their dismay and hopelessness about these and the multitude of other related incidences where justice did not play out the way we thought it should, prompting the response that there is no justice.

Relatedly, I had the fortune of working with one of these students on a final paper that looked at not only these cases but media and social media responses that could be used as an explanation for why such acts against black men are allowed to occur. The essence of this student's problem statement was, "this isn't right, so why is it allowed to happen?". Being objective about this is a challenge when it is apparent that in so many ways our lives and the lives of those we love and feel for is at stake. Luckily for me, I have the kind of academic training that allows for a good deal of my bias to be placed on the back burner in favor of finding scholarly articles that pretty much prove my bias to be valid. All of this to say that we were able to examine the problematic history of black men and how they are depicted in American culture via media. We did the same for (white) police officers--not that all of this made it into the student's paper.

 Hopefully this student has a better understanding of how and why it is so easy for black men, and other perpetual victims of the justice system who happen to be majority black but typically of marginalized statuses, to be blamed for their own demise and therefore not readily empathized with nor regarded with compassion by the larger American public. Indeed the "new racism" (also discussed in the student's paper) is alive and well when mainstream responses do everything in their power not to consider race as a factor despite discourse that demonstrates it all too clearly.

 So what do I wish I had said in response to the claim that there is no justice? Suggest that there is justice, but that it's just not for us and perhaps was never meant to be (which reminds me of  MJ's "They Don't Care About Us") . But what good is this response without offering some sense of hope to counter the inevitable fatalism that results? I have enough trouble digging out of the hole of fatalism as it is.