Intersectionality in the Court System


On my way to work every morning I listen to a radio show called the Breakfast Club on 94.5FM. Yesterday they had on a syndicated t.v. court Judge Faith Jenkins on their show. Typically this show is about the latest news in the entertainment business but I’ve grown to love how they always seem to ask the right questions of the people they invite on the show. While on the show they began to ask the judge questions about prosecutors, lack of resources for public defenders and the huge lack of representation for the “haves” vs. the “have-nots”. The judge quoted her college professor in asking “Would you rather be rich and guilty or poor and innocent”? The conversation went on about the moral dilemma of having to represent guilty people and about tax payers’ money being spent on years of incarceration for those people while simply waiting to stand trial and someone asked the judge, “Why even provide legal services for people who are blatantly guilty? Why not save the money?” To which she responded that picking and choosing who to provide legal representation for opens up a whole new can of worms and “you know who” would be affected the greatest by a system that operated in that way.  That struck a chord in me. I didn’t have a word to describe the injustice being discussed in that conversation until I started watching the Ted Talk video on “The Urgency of Intersectionality”. Its one thing to be a minority, but if you’re a minority and find yourself having legal issues, you’re more likely than not found to be guilty. Kimberly Crenshaw takes it further to explain that if you’re a female minority, you have a greater battle ahead of you. She argued that “The court’s failure to see the ways in which sex and race compounded the injustice against the plaintiffs indicated a systemic failure—one that isn’t limited only to black women.”
This topic is very interesting to me because I can see how it carries on into the classroom and how we, as educators, need to make every effort to be aware of those intersections that are affecting our learners and try to meet them on the side of the road to discuss how we can navigate safely forward through those intersections.

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