linnposts.com

A few days ago I read a moving article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune by a mother of two sons, one white and one black. Here is a portion of what she wrote:

“My own experience raising a black son has been an eye-opener. I have watched him be harassed by police at the end of the driveway — they insisted he put a key in the door to prove he lived in our (slightly) upscale neighborhood. They didn’t think he had business being there. After graduating high school, three days before his 18th birthday he was hauled off to the Juvenile Detention Center for breaking curfew; his white counterparts were told to go home. I once got a call from a middle-school teacher who confessed that she was scared of him because he was tall and “he looked like a man.” He was enrolled in an International Baccalaureate program. He was 13.”

That is the world she knows because it is the world she has lived and is living in with her two sons.

At the time I saw her article I happened to be reading material about last year’s Supreme Court decision that struck down a key provision of the 1965 voting rights act that required nine (9) states to get pre-approval from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion explaining why the conservative majority on the court made this decision. “Our country had changed,” he said. He said many other things, but that historic decision came down to this overarching conviction – our country had changed from its past history of racism.

Really? One thing is for sure. The five justices don’t see race relations the same way the mother who wrote the article for the paper does.

Personally I’m going with the mother.

Especially since within 24 hours of the Supreme Court decision, Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas began the process of writing and passing new voting rights laws critics said at the time openly discriminated against minorities, the elderly, and young voters. More than thirty other states have followed suit.

So far the courts have largely agreed with the critics, but my question is this: What in the name of high heaven could have possibly led those five conservative Supreme Court justices to believe the days of states writing racism into their voting rights laws was behind us?

Are they that removed from the real world people of color encounter every day? Or are they simply racists themselves?

Since I don’t know any of them, I do not know why their beliefs about racism are so skewed, but I do know they have no idea of the pain and agony that mother has been through.

Can anything cut a parent’s heart deeper than seeing her child treated unjustly and unfairly anytime, but especially because of something they cannot change like the color of their skin?

She didn’t say anything about the Supreme Court decision so I don’t know what she thought about it, but I suspect at the very least it left her wondering whether or not one of her sons will one day live in a state where his right to vote will have been made more difficult because of the color of his skin.

And because that is now a real possibility she will worry about, I say shame on the Supreme Court five. Shame, indeed.