Is “Liberty and Justice for all” really for “All”

 Bailee Galloway

Engl-44378

Ms. Harris

November 15,2022

Is “Liberty and Justice for all” really for “All”

            As a black person in America when I lay down at night and all I can hear is, “Say their names”, “No justice no peace”, and finally, “Mama I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe”.  The land of the “free” and the home of the “brave”, “liberty and justice for all”; These slogans were created by Francis Scott Keys and facade by the United States of America.  Since August of 1619, the formerly “free” have been enslaved and brutalized by a system of unprovoked violence and racism. In 2022 we as black people should not still be scared of leaving our homes and never returning, but this is real life reality we face in the so-called, “Land of the free”.

            On December 6, 1865, slavery was written to be abolished, but that truly never happened.  The oppressors just changed the name from slavery to prison. The new “enslavers” are police officers and the new “Slave” ship are prisons or graveyards.  In post-slavery times all is it takes is an African American being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  A famous example of this is the wrongful arrest and prosecution of the “Central Park Five”.  The Central Park Five case was an instance of a white jogger being raped and beaten one night and the teens happened to be in the park that same night.  As stated in the Netflix series, “Central Park Five'', the five teenage boys were interrogated without their parents being present and were forced to plead guilty by the cops, or the cops would harm them in some way.” The teens had never seen the lady before but since they were black young men out that night their lives would be forever altered by the justice system.  As stated by ABC news, “Prosecutors had no DNA and little evidence that matched the teenagers to the crime, the attack, or the scene.” The only crime these young men were guilty of was being born black in America. 

          A similar fictional instance of this is in the novel “Homegoing” by Yaa Gyasi, we are introduced to H, and descendant of Essi, and we find out that H has been wrongly arrested for whistling at a white woman. The police obviously had no proof of this but he was still arrested because the white woman told them it happened.  In a powerful dialogue between H and a man he is first imprisoned with, we get the prisoner's realization of the situation of being black in America.  As quoted by the prisoner, “Don’t matter if you was or wasn’t. All they gotta do is say you was. That’s all they gotta do…Naw, dem white folks can’t stand the sight of you. Walkin’ round free as can be”(Gyasi 145). This situation and dialogue is crucial to understanding our class theme of the Black Gothic because it proves no matter what African Americans do or don’t do, we will always be criminalized someway.  Later H is given a $10 fine but is rearrested because he can’t afford to pay for it and is sent to “slave” for a few years in the coal mines.  Since slavery was made illegal the police system had to figure out another way to get free labor.  This forced enslavement later leads to the downfall and death of will because even after he stopped working in the coal mines in the dangerous conditions, he still died of the sickness all the coal miners die of.  In this fictional situation we see the non-fiction reality many blacks have faced where the police system wrongfully prosecuted or takes their life.

          The words “Liberty and justice for all” that America loves, must not apply to adolescent black teenagers.  On the evening of February 26, 2012, unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was gun down walking from a convenience store.  He had gone to get some skittles and an ice tea but never made it back to his dad's house with them. A neighborhood coward named George Zimmerman followed Trayvon and gunned him down after police had told him to not follow the kid.  Zimmerman was eventually not found guilty of murder and got away with taking the life of Trayvon.

          These events of the tragic reality of being black in America are amplified in a text called “Wake Work” by Christina Sharpe, where she addresses the many struggles of African Americans in this country.  One of lines of the text that stood out to me is on page 15 Sharpe states, “Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property”(Sharpe 15).  In summary in this line, the author is meaning that modern-day blacks are not truly seen as free people, just property that got away.  We see this theory play out every day by how the justice system has little to no regard for the lives of African Americans.

          So, in reality, is “Liberty and Justice” really for all or just those who fit a certain stereotype.  As a nation, over 150 years after slavery was said to be abolished we are still having these conversations.  The dark reality is how many more generations are going to be debating these issues.

 

 

Works cited

Welsh, Susan. ABC News. 'I so wish the case hadn't been settled': 1989 Central Park jogger believes more than 1 person attacked her. (2019, May 23).

Gyasi, Y. (2022). H. In Homegoing (pp. 153–154). essay, Penguin Books.

Sharpe, C. E. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Editors, C. N. N. (2022, February 14). Trayvon Martin shooting fast facts. CNN.