The flawed worship of privilege and power

A recent Portsmouth Herald column, "The police are not the enemy," made me think that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day can't come soon enough.

Its attempt to defend a two-tiered justice system by pitting American against American rather speaking about reconciliation and justice is simply wrong-headed.

In "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" MLK wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

No matter how it's framed, our current crisis is not just about police. It's about deeply ingrained American institutional privilege and racist inequities; inequities clearly apparent in disparities in sentencing and incarceration rates, family income, access to education and health care, and employment and housing opportunities.

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Sojourners' Jim Wallis, in his "Pastoral Letter to White Americans" wrote, "Many white Americans tend to see this problem as unfortunate incidents based on individual circumstances. Black Americans see a system in which their black lives matter less than white lives. That is a fundamental difference of experience between white and black Americans... The question is: Are we white people going to listen or not?"

"White Americans," Wallis continued, "Talk about how hard and dangerous police work is — that most cops are good and are to be trusted. Black Americans agree that police work is  dangerously hard, but also have experienced systemic police abuse of their families. All black people, especially black men, have their own stories. Since there are so many stories, are these really just isolated incidents? We literally have two criminal justice systems in America — one for whites and one for blacks."