In What Way Justice?

What does it mean to be an American the day after Georgia may have just murdered an innocent man?

Read the first words of the preamble to our Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice.”

Read the phrase engraved above the entrance to the U.S. Supreme Court: “Equal Justice Under Law.”

And read the reaction by the widow of the man Troy Davis was convicted of murdering 22 years ago: “We have laws in this land so that there is not chaos.”

In this year of global upheaval – from Egypt to Wisconsin – what is happening to our capacity to serve as the world’s beacon of freedom and equality? And when did our conception of justice shift so mightily – from securing equal treatment to avoiding chaos?

For those of us concerned with comprehensive school reform, the execution of Troy Davis is more than a temporary news item. Just twenty years old when he was arrested, Davis was also a high school dropout. And although his full reasons for doing so are unclear, what is clear is that of the ~1.2 million young people who leave school each year, more than half are from minority groups. Worse still, this pipeline of talent is running in the wrong direction, and sending disproportionate numbers of African-American men away from the workforce and higher education, and toward the dead end of the prison system.

The Advancement Project, a civil rights “action tank” committed to highlighting this issue, explains: “Across the country, school systems are shutting the doors of academic opportunity on students and funneling them into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The combination of overly harsh school policies and an increased role of law enforcement in schools has created a “schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,” in which punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, and huge numbers of youth are pushed out of school and into prisons and jails. In many communities, this transforms schools from places of learning to dangerous gateways into juvenile court. This is more than an education crisis; it is a racial justice crisis, because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are disproportionately students of color.”

The economic and opportunity costs of this exodus have been well documented. Yet today, in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s cavalier reluctance to intervene in the state-sanctioned execution of a potentially innocent man, let’s be clear: the cost of this systemic societal dysfunction runs much deeper than lost wages. At stake is the legitimacy of our status as a nation committed to equal justice under law. At stake are the lives of potentially innocent men and women caught up in the gears of our legal system. And although our courts would seem to bear the sole weight of righting the ship, it is our public schools that are most responsible for giving young people the skills and self-confidence they need to not just stay out of trouble, but also become active, visible contributors to the common good. As the Greek philosopher Plato observed, more than 2,500 years ago, a civil society’s ultimate wellbeing rests primarily on its capacity to answer a single question: “But how, exactly,” he wrote, “will they be reared and educated by us? And does our considering this contribute anything to our goal of discerning that for the sake of which we are considering all these things – in what way justice and injustice come into being in a city?”

In the Middle East & America, Nothing Left to Fear But . . . Freedom Itself

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

As waves of Arab protesters keep taking to the streets in countries across the Middle East, and as panels of Egyptian experts begin revisiting their country’s constitution in the wake of their country’s 18-day revolution, I want to take the infamous FDR line and give it a new ring: “The only thing we have to fear is . . . freedom itself.”

At first blush, this may seem foolish. After all, what aspect of the human condition could be more universal than the need to be free, and the desire to have the space to shape one’s own life and determine one’s own path in the world? And yet, while it’s unquestionable that freedom is the fundamental condition for any real growth, freedom from oppression means little if it is not accompanied by the freedom to fully be ourselves – and not just the freedom to select what type of jeans to wear, or even which politician to vote for. It’s a deeper level of self-actualization that we all seek in that word – and it’s something we in America, two centuries into our own experiment in liberty, are still learning about and struggling to support.

To see this tension played out in the life of a single individual, look no further than the legendary U.S. Supreme Court justice – and FDR appointee – Hugo Lafayette Black. It was Black who became known as the Court’s most absolutist defender of individual freedoms. And it was Black who warned us, back in 1961, that “too many men are being driven to become government fearing and time-serving because the Government is being permitted to strike out at those who are fearless enough to think as they please and say what they think. The choice is clear to me,” Black wrote. “If we are to pass on that great heritage of freedom, we must return to the original language of the Bill of Rights. We must not be afraid to be free.”

Reading these words, it seems incongruous that the Black of 1961 could, in 1969, also write these lines: “Change has been said to be truly the law of life, but sometimes the old and tried and true are worth holding. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable liberty,” he asserted, “is an enemy to domestic peace.”

What had happened in the span of those eight tumultuous years? Had the social unrest of the 1960s caused Black to lose his abiding faith in the constitutional principles of freedom and democracy?  Not exactly.  But he had certainly lost faith in the ability of the nation’s citizens – and particularly its young people – to exercise that freedom productively. In short, the octogenarian Justice whose career had been in the service of expanding freedom, and who had been watching the ways that freedom was being applied in the streets outside his office window – angrily, messily, passionately, violently – had started to doubt whether a truly robust application of free-speech rights was in the best interests of safety, order, and the future of the republic.  “Anything can happen here,” he told a friend, just weeks before his death – on Constitution Day, September 17, 1971.

History has of course shown us that, despite Black’s fears, the republic still stands. And yet Black’s inability to fully maintain his own commitment to freedom in the face of his own personal fears is instructive to all of us – particularly our world’s newest fellow experimenters in democracy. As with all things worthwhile, rough days lie ahead.

For better or worse, America has committed itself to an unprecedented experiment in freedom, an experiment premised on the principle that more speech is better, that more information will produce better judgments, that more knowledge will make more self-realized persons, that more associations and beliefs will make us more open-minded, that more press freedom will benefit society, that more robust expression of all sorts will make us a freer people, and that the more we allow for all of this the better our chances are to discover truth, beauty, freedom, and something about ourselves as well.  That, at any rate, is the operative principle; call it a collective hunch?  On that principle – a core First Amendment principle – we have banked everything.

Freedom also has its costs.  That is precisely why we fear it.  And the freedoms we have long honored – and that Egypt, Tunisia and other countries are now themselves seeking to embrace – is no different.  When liberals or libertarians applaud it, they can all too easily ignore the risks – indeed, the dangers – posed by unchecked expression.  By the same token, when conservatives or conformists rally against it, they can ignore the fact that unchecked demands for security lead all too often to tyranny.

This is not an argument for a “happy medium.” Rather, it is to say that those who love freedom or value security must be mindful of what they wish for. As the great educator John Dewey once warned, “The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states . . . The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.”