Racism doesn’t exist anymore. A bold claim, yet while many contend this to be true, the facts seem to consistently argue against it. You don’t have to wait long until another story of discrimination or an outright display of prejudice pops up in the news.
One week it’s tragedy like James Byrd Jr. being forcibly dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by three white males in Jasper. The next its South Carolina Highway Patrol officers intentionally running down African-American suspects with their patrol cars. But this time, it’s a different tune entirely as Atlanta Judge Marvin Arrington recently found out.
On March 27 Arrington asked all white attendees of a routine sentencing hearing to leave the courtroom so that he could lecture the black defendants. Arrington, who is African-American, said he got fed up seeing a parade of young black defendants shuffle into his courtroom and decided to address them out of earshot of white lawyers. The judge thought his message would make a greater impact if he delivered it to a black-only audience, he said. “I was just saying, ‘Please get yourself together,'” Arrington said.
Arrington has since publicly stated that, in retrospect, this was a mistake. A week later he invited anyone, regardless of race, to hear his same message from March 27.
It’s respectful that Arrington admitted his wrong and invited everyone back to hear this initial message, but it seems like he is still missing the point. Arrington delivered a clichéd, simple speech about staying in school and off the streets, espousing values like believing in yourself and not breaking the law.
There was nothing controversial or even necessarily racially charged about what he had to say in court that Thursday. But for some reason he still felt compelled to offer it to a strictly black audience. It’s tempting to suggest that this would be a different story entirely if a white judge had asked every African-American to leave. And it’s equally tempting for many to naively label this as some form of reverse discrimination, but besides the argument that this even exists, that’s just as ignorant as racism itself.
But this is not to say what’s occurred here is wrong. Arrington’s conviction for his work is clearly strong and his intentions in the right place. But his message wasn’t something that only benefited African-Americans, or any one race for that matter. It could’ve benefited anyone with the opportunity to hear it. And this kind of narrow-minded attention to race gives it so much power us. So next time, don’t segregate knowledge. Save the message for society as a whole. It might not make the news, but it could still change someone’s life for the better.
