Love looks like Justice!

    Implicit bias in our preferences, thinking & feeling have become ingrained or institutionalized in all the systems of our society, codified into laws & regulations.  Possibly we’re not even fully-conscious of the deep-rooted, learned responses we’ve assimilated. These systems disproportionately disenfranchise, oppress, criminalize & incarcerate minorities, causing great harm to our society.  Bigotry is a cancer raging through our systems, but we’re empowered to excision & healing.  Racism starts early; Black infant-mortality rates are twice as high as for Whites; Black women are 3 to 4 times more likely to suffer pregnancy-related deaths.  We need equal access to affordable, premium healthcare for all Americans, Head-start & daycare-subsidies for working parents. 

    Statistics show that K-12 schools punish Black children (near 16 percent of student-body) at higher-rates than Whites, comprising near 51 percent of students nationwide.  This “suspicion of guilt” follows them throughout their school years; “some schools have a troubling-practice of calling law-enforcement to discipline Black students on schoolgrounds”, creating the “school-to-prison-pipeline”, channeling students into the ‘criminal-justice’ system early, while teaching people-of-color they can expect unfair treatment.  Repeated suspensions/expulsions cause spotty-learning, dropouts, lower graduation-rates, ‘unreadiness’ for college; and with the system of racial-profiling, more inclination toward arrest.  Black students tend to incur more student-loan debt, and are hired at a lesser-rate. 

    Racist housing-policies further ‘climate-segregation’ in cities.  Housing must be indexed to wages, and workers must receive a living-wage!   There’s huge systemic-racism in lending, excluding Blacks from property-ownership & wealth-building.  Follow the money, look at the big bankers, willing to build private FOR-PROFIT-prisons to incarcerate millions of Black-Americans.  The legacies of slavery & racism more apparent in our legal-penal-system than anywhere else.  “Big banks fund police foundations, and Wall Street directly profits from police brutality.  We must STOP the extraction of wealth from workers” & extracting people from our communities, by over-incarceration.  Whites created these systems and WE ALL need to change them NOW!  We must STOP police brutality; STOP police from murdering unarmed-Blacks in our streets, by holding police fully-accountable for their recklessness & extreme-force!

    Illinois’ Governor Pritzker set a progressive-example by signing the criminal justice reform bill on 2/22/21, saying “this is going to make policing safer and the public safer”.  LOVE looks like JUSTICE!  The change begins with ‘US’, a change in consciousness, in our hearts & minds, our speech & actions.  We’re amidst a racial-reckoning; we must STOP & Self-reflect …. then act, turning things around for minority-youth, their families, our communities, for ALL OUR SAKES!   Responsibility means the ability to respond, appropriately.   “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!”   

Trish Forsyth Voss

         “You didn’t have to be a slave-owner to have benefitted from the results of slaves building up an economy & structure that mainly whites benefitted from. It’s way past time to begin in earnest the reparations for the actions of our ancestors & the structures set in place by the slavers, the slaveholders & all the generations that benefitted” since ’emancipation’ — that should have been set-right long ago.   “Advocate, advocate, advocate!  Power concedes nothing without a demand”, said Frederick Douglass.  IT’S TIME TO CHANGE!