Fighting White Supremacy: Local Elections

As I was writing about fighting white supremacy, and finding ways to do that, it occurred to me that I could go through various aspects of how white supremacy functions and specific actions for each aspect. It was always the plan to get to local elections, because those play a role.

Because of misguided, ignorant, hostile, downright wrong things church members were posting, I diverted into posts about Operation Underground Railroad and Cancel Culture. 

Just as I was finishing up those tangents, church members are being misguided, ignorant, hostile and wrong about school board elections. I mean, it fits back in to where I was going to go, but please, fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, please stop being exhausting.

I am going to be going hard on school board elections on the main blog (sporkful.blogspot.com) for several posts starting tomorrow, so I encourage you to follow along there.

(Sneak preview: the key identifiers of people in the QAnon adjacent campaigns to run our schools is an insistence that schools should be open regardless of virus risk and a hatred for Critical Race Theory -- which they believes gives white kids poor self-esteem. I will get to that.)

However, for this post on the importance of local elections, I will focus on law enforcement.

You may be aware that laws are not equally enforced, and that inequality works as a means of social control. 

Therefore, even though people of color are not more likely to use drugs than white people, they are much more likely to be searched, charged, and imprisoned for drug offenses. Even as many white people are capitalizing on legal marijuana and doing quite well financially by it, many people of color are still in jail on old charges.

But it was illegal then! True. Follow up question: do you think the people with boutique marijuana shops and their clientele only started using when it became legal?

District attorneys decide what crimes to focus on in prosecution, which pleas to accept, and what level of severity to pursue. 

Judges have a say in how that plays out. They can reject some charges or sentences, but what comes before them depends a lot upon the discretion of the DA.

County sheriffs will have some control over how law enforcement occurs. For many of these discussions, city police chiefs come up more often, but that is an appointed position. Mayors and city council members have an impact, but that gets to be more complicated.

Obviously local decisions about schools matter, as do decisions about water and soil and parks and who goes to the state legislature. It may be helpful as elections come around to look at the positions and think about what they do. 

For this post, I want to focus on district attorneys.

I wrote about such an election just three years ago:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/05/political-ads.html

One reason I was very against the incumbent -- who won -- was his tendency to lock up potential witnesses whom he did not trust to appear. This included one suspect's father -- who was not accused of any crime himself -- and a rape victim. 

Those cases were particularly cruel. Someone who abuses power so flagrantly is not someone likely to worry about white supremacy.

Speaking of unequal enforcement of the law, the father was Latino and the rape victim was a woman and a convict. In fact, she had been raped by a prison guard while confined. I suppose that made it easy for Washington County DA Bob Hermann and Circuit Judge Charles Bailey to decide that she couldn't be trusted. She said she would appear, but that wasn't good enough. 

Her accused rapist -- a white man and a corrections officer -- was allowed to remain free. Hermann and Bailey didn't seem to mind that this treatment was cruel, could easily discourage other witnesses from identifying themselves, or how rare it is for a rape case to result in jail time, even with witnesses. 

https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2016/09/accuser_in_prison_sex_case_jai.html

I also recall when Sebastian Junger came to town on tour for his book, A Death in Belmont. His appearance was protested by an Oregon crime victims group, with the support of the Multnomah County DA at the time. Why was he being protested? Because his book was about a wrongful conviction. 

I read the book; their complaints were inaccurate. They didn't care, which is a common issue with victims' rights groups. It's not that advocating for victims is not important, but to get so invested in the criminal justice system that you want innocent people to get convicted and stay convicted is not justice.

I am not saying that their protest was even partially about the exoneration of a Black man. However, the probable murderer was a white man, and there should have been clues and evidence for that. That the law went for the Black man is not a coincidence. That was also the case in the book referenced here:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/07/and-thats-when-i-gave-up-on-death.html

That is white supremacy. You may notice that it isn't great for women, either. 

All of the oppressions end up combining together. Some people oppress when they can, but it is better to fight the oppression. 

One way of doing that is local elections. Our next one is on May 18th, and ballots and voter guides have been sent out.