OpEd: 'People not only watch faithfully, but root for the police and the prosecutor.'
, leading to the human rights crisis that is underway at Rikers right now.
As a public defender and a Black woman, I find myself asking now more than ever: “How does the criminal system and mass incarceration continue to expand and worsen despite all these people opposing it?” I’ve come to think it is because everyone is more aligned than we think. We have been educated by the same popular culture — taught to accept the same cruelty as the status quo.
It might seem cliche to blame societal ills on the media, but the relationship between our country’s comfort with mass caging and the depiction of crime and punishment that we see in popular culture seems more than coincidental. Media consumption is what we all have in common. It’s why even my mother, who lives in The Bahamas, often tells me “some people belong under the jail,” or that “some people are just evil, Olayemi.
I think about one of the many times I was misidentified as a criminal defendant in court, when a court officer angrily screamed at me to get out of the first row, where attorneys sit. I was sitting there with my colleagues, dressed like them, holding court files like them. The only difference between us was that I am a Black woman. I told the officer I was in the right seat because I am an attorney. He left the courtroom and when he returned, he said, “My bad, Ms.
The interaction was illuminating not because he assumed I was a defendant because I’m Black , or even that he was mistreating me because he thought I was a defendant; the illuminating part was that he told me. He was willing to offer me an explanation of his mistreatment because he thought it was. In his mind, it was perfectly acceptable to scream at a person accused of a crime. So acceptable in fact, he expected that even I, a criminal defense attorney, wouldn’t object.
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