11.3 The Intersectionality of Justice
Alexis Castaneda-Perez
Preface
As a psychology major, I was surprised to find myself contributing and writing for a Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS) open textbook. “What does any of this have to do with the human psyche?” was something I was asking myself before I started researching and writing. While we learned of intersectionality in HDFS 201, I didn’t really start to fully grasp the concept until I started writing for this project. It’s not just sociology and psychology that come into play when we talk about social justice, but instead, a strong cooperation of multiple disciplines is involved in understanding how inequality and injustice occur. Everything is connected whether we realize it or not.
After that happened during the spring and summer of 2020, it feels very gratifying to try and help educate others on topics and ideas that I myself didn’t fully understand when I began writing. Challenging myself to do this project has only made me a better student. If there’s anything that I would like for someone to take away from this reading, it’s this: for some, it is easy to deny that many of the ideas discussed (such as intersectionality and institutional racism) exist. Human civilization and society stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Many modern institutions and values in the United States were founded on the antiquated idea that those pertaining to a certain class and race were superior to others. Context matters, and it shouldn’t be ignored.
With that being said, I want to thank everyone who collaborated on this project for being some of the most open-minded and friendly people I’ve met!
Following is a series of short essays that explore various groups who experience injustice and the ways that social identities overlap with the justice system.
What Does Justice Look Like?
The last few words of the United States Pledge of Allegiance are: “with liberty and justice for all.” This ideal is part of our nation’s identity, but the unfortunate reality is that our justice system wasn’t ever made to be fair. The first form of police in the southern part of the United States were slave patrols (Potter, n.d.). Their purpose was to capture escaped enslaved people, prevent further escape, and discipline those enslaved. For hundreds of years in the United States, the justice system’s job was to enforce the idea of White supremacy and to limit the rights of women and POC. This can be seen in Supreme Court cases such as Dred Scott V. Sandford, where the Supreme Court ruled that anyone with African ancestry could never become a citizen of the United States and, therefore, not be able to sue in federal court. The Supreme Court also seized this opportunity to rule that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. This meant that the federal government couldn’t prevent slavery in certain territories. This decision was unsurprising to many Americans because seven of the nine Supreme Court justices at the time of the Dred Scott decision had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents (PBS, n.d.). Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who authored the majority opinion for the Dred Scott case, wrote in reference to the legal status of African Americans, “They are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States” (Brewer & Heitzeg, 2008).
While there may not be laws, rules, and regulations that explicitly target POC today, there do exist many for which their entire origins are based on racism and prejudice (see Chapter 8). In many cases, those whose duty is to exercise the law simply choose to ignore crimes that are being committed against POC. For example, 37% of cases involving missing/disappeared Native American women are dismissed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office (National Indian Council on Aging, 2019).
In the “Going Deeper” section of this chapter, there is a podcast and activity related to missing and murdered Indigenous women that includes data as well as interviews with the parents of murdered Indigenous women.
This is a pattern that goes back to at least the 1920s when local law enforcement neglected to properly investigate murdered Native Americans during the infamous “Osage Indian murders,” as they have been called. These murders show one of the more blatant attempts of a government circumventing justice in order to oppress and marginalize a group of minorities. The Osage people of Kansas were relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma around 1870. What later became known as the Osage reservation is located on top of one of the largest oil deposits in the country. As a result of this, the Osage people saw an extraordinary increase in wealth. The United States Congress eventually passed a law requiring a guardian to assume control of every Osage’s finances until they were deemed “competent.” The guardians were, of course, always White males, who usually didn’t have the best interests of the Osage in mind, often defrauding them.
“Justice” Depends on Race
There currently exists a disparity in the United States that has been rapidly increasing, particularly within the last two decades. African Americans face harsher punishments than a White person would for committing the exact same crime. If you compare the sentence of a Black person and a White person for a similar crime, Black people serve sentences around 19% longer than White people do on average. Not only do Black people serve longer sentences, but the more Afrocentric features someone has, the more likely they are to be sentenced to death (United States Sentencing Commission, 2017).
This recent disparity, while having many causes, can largely be attributed to the Supreme Court ruling on the case of United States V. Booker. The Supreme Court ruled that judges didn’t have to strictly adhere to mandatory sentencing regulations that were created in 1984 under the Sentencing Reform Act, a bipartisan bill that aimed to increase fairness and consistency of sentences (whether this reform actually worked could be debated as well, because the Reagan administration doubled down on Nixon’s War on Drugs during his presidency; the policies introduced during this time disproportionately targeted POC).
Instead, the federal government found that the United States V. Booker ruling actually has been counterproductive to the Sentencing Reform Act and actually created more sentences inconsistent with regulations and a greater racial disparity as well (U.S. Department of Justice, 2006). Because judges can use the regulations as just advisory, their biases and preconceived notions of POC have a much larger role in the sentencing of minorities than they did before 1984.
The War on Drugs
Originally coined by former president Richard Nixon, the War on Drugs was first started as a campaign by the Nixon administration. Although it wasn’t known as “the War on Drugs” until 1971, drug reform in the United States dates back many years, all the way to the beginning of the 20th century when the first drug prohibition policies were being passed. The Harrison Narcotics Tax of 1914 was one of the first federal laws to regulate drugs (PBS, n.d.). On paper, the aims of the Nixon campaign were to try and shrink the drug trade in the United States and prevent new addicts through various policies (Nixon, 1971), which included the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency and giving increased funding to law enforcement agencies (LEA) to actively seek out drug charges. Drug crime was so low on the priority list for most LEAs when the “war” started that many agencies did not try to enforce the new policy.
To try and get all LEA to participate in the war, the federal government provided them with a few incentives. Firstly, they could compete to receive federal cash grants. This allowed many agencies to expand their number of officers and to start a new narcotics task force in order to increase the number of arrests. Simply put, more arrests and convictions equal more money for the agency. In addition to giving money to LEA, the federal government also provided cooperating agencies with intelligence, special training, and equipment in order to carry out the war. To top it all off, the government let agencies keep almost all of the money that they seized in drug raids (Alexander, 2020). Overall, this system has led to issues such as the militarization of the police and an increase of POC in prison for nonviolent crimes.
The Militarization of Police
As a direct result of the War on Drugs, the police in the United States are given more freedom and weaponry than ever before, resulting in the militarization or the transformation of a civilian agency to become more like the military. Concerns have been raised recently regarding what is called “Warrior Culture” that is present in many police departments, where officers are encouraged to take a “warrior’s mindset.” This sometimes is in contrast to academy training and is instead encouraged by fellow officers, but not always. The warrior mindset can also be understood as an “Us vs Them” form of thinking.
Police are being taught that they live in a hostile environment that is out to get them (Stoughton, 2015). Rookie officers are told constantly that their lives are in danger and that they should be scared or else they could die. Many departments say that their first and immediate goal is to make sure officers are unharmed and get home safely; this tends to foster fear in officers and causes overestimation of danger. As a result, officers are more likely to treat ordinary citizens as a threat and to escalate the situation entirely. This counterintuitively raises the risk of death for both police officers and citizens.
In order to benefit our communities to the best of their ability, police must work closely with the communities that they are serving. A heavily armed and paranoid police force does not mesh well with people who are growing ever more distrustful of police. For many decades, national confidence and trust in the police have remained at around 60% (Tyler, 2011). Unsurprisingly, trust and confidence in the police is much lower in minority communities. African Americans’ trust in the police sits at just 31% (Tyler, 2005). While minority communities could greatly benefit from a well-trained police presence, they are often disproportionately arrested, harassed, disrespected, and made victims of police brutality.
Police Brutality
…the senseless acts of killings of these young boys out there.…This is reality, this is my world, this is what I talk about in my music. You can’t delude that. Me being on a cop car, that’s a performance piece after these senseless acts.…Hip-hop is not the problem. Our reality is the problem of the situation. This is our music. This is us expressing ourselves.
—Kendrick Lamar
During the 2015 BET Awards, Kendrick Lamar performed his hit song “Alright” from his album To Pimp a Butterfly, whose lyrics have been praised by critics for being politically charged and a socially relevant commentary on the struggles of the modern African American (figure 11.5). At some point in the performance, Lamar stood on top of a police car that had been vandalized, a symbolic statement for many viewers showcasing his support for those protesting the killing of unarmed Black men and condemning the police for their actions. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was founded in 2013 by three women in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, shown in figure 11.6 (Black Lives Matter Herstory, n.d.). In 2014 and 2015, many high-profile cases of police brutality emerged. To name a few: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray. There were over 1,059 known police killings in the United States in 2014 (Mapping Police Violence, n.d.), many of whom were unarmed. It was during this year that the BLM movement gained more traction.
Lamar faced backlash from those critical of the BLM movement. Lyrics such as “…and we hate po-po, wanna kill us dead in the streets fo sho” got the attention of Fox News pundit Geraldo Rivera, who said, “This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African Americans than racism in recent years. This is exactly the wrong message.” Lamar responded by saying, “Hip-hop is not the problem. Our reality is the problem of the situation. This is us expressing ourselves.”
POC are more likely than White people to be victims of police brutality, African American men, Native American/Alaskan Native women, and Latino men, to be more specific. African American men are the most likely out of all races to be victims. Black men face a one in 1,000 chance of being killed by police throughout their lifetime (Edwards et al., 2019). The blame for all of this is all too often placed on POC. Kendrick Lamar’s words are affirming for many young people and still ring true today. With the 2020 deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the United States has seen a surge in protests across all 50 states (Burch et al., 2020).
There are many parallels that can be drawn from the civil rights movement of the 1960s as well as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but there is a unique history happening right in front of our eyes. With the relatively recent rise of smartphone cameras, people can now capture police brutality with relative ease, as well as the ability to upload it straight to the internet as it happens. While some would hurry to dismiss the problem of police abusing their power as just “a few bad apples,” we can now see that police brutality isn’t a rare or isolated incident. There is a clear pattern of abuse, one that has been occurring in this country for centuries. It is clear that police brutality is a systemic problem in the United States.
Gender, Underrepresentation, and Intersectionality
With many of the high-profile cases of police brutality being about men, women of color are often forgotten in the discussion. Due to this, there, unfortunately, are not many studies that particularly focus on the experiences of women of color. The most oppressed voices are usually the least heard. Women of color are at the intersection of gender and race and are victims of police violence just as much as men of color. Physical violence isn’t the only way women suffer at the hands of the police; they are also more likely to face sexual assault.
Sexual assault is the second most reported form of police misconduct in the United States (Bennett, 2018; National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, 2010). Transgender women are most vulnerable to sexual violence by the police. Fifteen percent of transgender women report being sexually assaulted while in police custody, while African American transgender women report an astounding 32% assault rate (Office of Justice Programs, 2014). Some of these instances of sexual violence occur during “searches,” where officers look for narcotics or other paraphernalia. Black men are also often victims of police sexual violence (Chan, 2007). During an investigation by Associated Press News on police sexual misconduct, it was discovered that over 1,000 police officers lost their jobs over a six-year period for sex-related crimes (Sedensky, 2015). The Say Her Name movement was started to bring light to the issues women of color face. We can quickly see a pattern forming. The more instances of intersectionality in your life, the more likely you are to be a victim of violence and systematic oppression.
Comprehension Self Check
Licenses and Attributions for The Intersectionality of Justice
Open Content, Original
“The Intersectionality of Justice” by Alexis Castaneda-Perez. License: CC BY 4.0.
Open Content, Shared Previously
Figure 11.5. Kendrick Lamar by Andrew Stephenson for The Come Up Show. License: CC BY-ND 2.0.
Figure 11.6. “TEDWomen2016_20161027_0MA12721_1920” by Marla Aufmuth/TED. License: CC BY-NC 2.0.
References
Alexander, M. (2020). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. New Press.
Bennett, K. (2018, June 14). Say her name: Recognizing police brutality against Black women. ACLU. https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/say-her-name-recognizing-police-brutality-against-black
Black Lives Matter Herstory. (n.d.). https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/
Brewer, R. M., & Heitzeg, N. A. (2008). The racialization of crime and punishment: Criminal justice, color-blind racism, and the political economy of the prison industrial complex. American Behavioral Scientist, 51(5), 625–644. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764207307745
Burch, A. D. S., Cai, W., Gianordoli, G., McCarthy, M., & Patel, J. K. (2020, June 13). How Black Lives Matter reached every corner of America. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/13/us/george-floyd-protests-cities-photos.html?auth=login-google
Chan, S. (2007, August 9). The Abner Louima case, 10 years later. New York Times. https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/the-abner-louima-case-10-years-later/
Edwards, F., Lee, H., & Esposito, M. (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(34), 16793–16798. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116
Mapping Police Violence. About the data. (n.d.). About the data. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata
National Indian Council on Aging. (2019, January 21). Inadequate data on missing, murdered indigenous women and girls. https://www.nicoa.org/inadequate-data-on-missing-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls/
National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project. (2010). Police misconduct statistical report. CATO Institute. https://www.leg.state.nv.us/Session/77th2013/Exhibits/Assembly/JUD/AJUD338L.pdf
Nixon, R. M. (1971, June 17). President Nixon declares “war” on drugs. The American Presidency Project. https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/medical-magazines/president-nixon-declares-war-drugs
Office of Justice Programs. (2014, June). The numbers. https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/pubs/forge/sexual_numbers.html
PBS. (n.d.). Dred Scott’s fight for freedom. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2932.html
PBS. (n.d.) Opium through history. Frontline. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heroin/etc/history.html
Potter, G. (2013, June 25). The history of policing in the United States. EKU Online. https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-history-of-policing-in-us.pdf
Sedensky, M. (2015, October 31). Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/fd1d4d05e561462a85abe50e7eaed4ec
Stoughton, S. (2015, April 10). Law enforcement’s “warrior” problem. Harvard Law Review, 128(6). https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/
Tyler, T. R. (2011). Trust and legitimacy: Policing in the USA and Europe. European Journal of Criminology, 8(4), 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370811411462
Tyler, T. R. (2005). Policing in black and white: Ethnic group differences in trust and confidence in the police. Police Quarterly, 8(3), 322–342. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098611104271105
U.S. Department of Justice. (2006, March 15). The impact of United States v. Booker on federal sentencing [fact sheet]. https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/docs/United_States_v_Booker_Fact_Sheet.pdf
U.S. Sentencing Commission. (2017, November). Demographic differences in sentencing: An update to the 2012 Booker Report. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2017/20171114_Demographics.pdf
an approach originally advanced by women of color that finds it critical to look at how identities and characteristics (such as ethnicity, race, and gender) overlap and influence each other to create complex hierarchies of power and oppression.
concerned with equity, equality, fairness and sometimes punishment.
the categorization of humans using observable physical or biological criteria, such as skin color, hair color or texture, facial features, etc.
can include the aim, goal, or intention of an action; a long-term guiding principle; the impact our life has on the world.
the process of preparing for war or another conflict; can refer to the transformation of a civilian agency becoming more like a military operation.
the shared meanings and shared experiences passed down over time by individuals in a group, such as beliefs, values, symbols, means of communication, religion, logics, rituals, fashions, etiquette, foods, and art that unite a particular society.
a socially constructed expression of a person’s sexual identity which influences the status, roles, and norms for their behavior.
making degrading comments, touching in unpleasant means of harm, or addressing a partner in a degrading way during sexual intercourse, which includes marital rape.
a biological descriptor involving chromosomes and internal/external reproductive organs.
being confined within a prison or jail.
the developmental changes and transitions that come with being a child, adolescent, or adult.
the shared social, cultural, and historical experiences, stemming from common national, ancestral, or regional backgrounds, that make subgroups of a population different from one another.
a subgroup of a population with a set of shared social, cultural, and historical experiences; relatively distinctive beliefs, values, and behaviors; and some sense of identity of belonging to the subgroup.
a systematic investigation into a particular topic, examining materials, sources, and/or behaviors.