A Knock at Midnight(26)
To see so many Black men led away in shackles as their families wept in the front row was profoundly troubling to me. I was witnessing mass incarceration at its height and could not help but be affected. It was all just too close to home. I was studying hard to be a lawyer. But in the federal courthouse in downtown Houston, the law, or at least its application, was beginning to seem very, very flawed.
One day, I had the opportunity to sit in on a full trial for a high-profile drug case. These were no small-time dealers being prosecuted, but members of an international drug cartel. The case seemed like an episode from Miami Vice. The men on trial had been charged with importing dozens of tons of powder cocaine into the United States across the Rio Grande border. I watched with fascination as the prosecutors built an airtight case. The feds had everything on these guys: surveillance video of cartel members sealing bricks of cocaine into tires that they stacked in waiting trucks; wiretap evidence; photographs of bundles of money changing hands. Guilty verdicts were guaranteed.
There was just one thing that didn’t make sense: the sentences. The drug cartel had imported truckloads of drugs across the border into the United States, dozens of tons of pure cocaine. I’d seen pictures of the stuff, piles of it. Yet when the judge in the case finally read their sentences out loud, I couldn’t believe my ears. The sentences of the men who had organized and run this multi-million-dollar international drug ring ranged from six to twenty-five years in prison. Nearly all the men I’d seen paraded in and out of Judge Atlas’s court for crack got sentences twice that for far less quantities. And Keyon got life for two kilograms of crack—the same weight as a plastic bottle of Heinz ketchup.
In these courtrooms, the incredible sense of progress and possibility I’d felt in the wake of President Obama’s election seemed nonexistent. The disparity in sentencing blew my mind. I began to wonder whether America’s harsh drug sentences were tied to the drugs in a man’s hands or the melanin in his skin.
Seeking answers for the disparity between the “post-racial” America being lauded by mainstream media and what I’d witnessed in court, I signed up for a seminar class at SMU that fall. Well, “sign up” doesn’t exactly cut it. Professor David Lacy, one of the few Black professors at SMU, allowed only twenty students into Critical Race Theory. I knew the class was about examining the intersection between race and the law, and I hoped it might hold some answers to the questions that were beginning to feel incredibly urgent to me. But the class was always full, with a long waitlist. Short of staging a one-woman sit-in, I did everything possible to gain admission. Two or three times a day I would check to see if someone had dropped, making space for me. It never happened. I wrote emails. I appealed to the dean. Finally, a week before the semester started, I petitioned Professor Lacy himself to let me in, and, fatefully, he did. Taking that class would change the course of my life.
Professor Lacy had a salt-and-pepper goatee, waist-length dreadlocks down his back, and a fabulous collection of silk ties. He embodied that alchemy that seems so natural in great teachers, a simultaneous vigorous energy and calm, gentle demeanor that created space for sometimes difficult discussions. On the first day of class he paced in front of us, gesturing passionately. “Critical Race Theory takes as its premise that racism is ingrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” he said. “That’s not a question, and not up for debate in this class. The question is, how?” I leaned in with my classmates as he tackled the taboo subject of race head-on. It was the most diverse class I’d taken at SMU, nearly fifty percent students of color, which in itself changed the classroom dynamic, opening space for voices so often silenced.
Professor Lacy took in our excitement and anxieties and let them weight and energize his words. “In what ways,” he continued, “do our legal structures intersect with race and other forms of oppression, and how does that impact people’s lives? How do our laws contribute to the experience of white supremacy in this nation? This course demands that we rigorously interrogate the very assumption that law itself is just. It will require not only a sharp and open mind but an open heart. For the class final, you will select a subject to interrogate and present to your peers, demonstrating how racial discrimination intersects with the law, and provide an argument for a way forward.”
For me, Professor Lacy’s class was a godsend. On the very first day of class, this dynamic, poised Black professor—my very first—laid out in the first moments as an inarguable premise something that by now I knew in my very bones: that race shaped all of our lives, brown, white, or Black, in both visible and invisible ways, and that our legal systems were inseparable from our sordid racial past.
While the topics of the course ranged far and wide, from bank redlining to employment discrimination, from public education funding to gerrymandering, each example more illuminating than the last, I knew almost from the beginning what I wanted to research for my final class paper and presentation. I wanted to grapple with what I had seen in Judge Atlas’s courtroom, and to heed Mr. Mitchell’s call to look more deeply into his son’s case. I decided to write about the unjust difference between crack cocaine and powder cocaine sentencing and the disparate effect this had on Black people.
In 1986, Congress enacted the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, implementing mandatory minimum sentences for federal drug offenses. Federal law adopted a 100-to-1 ratio, treating one gram of crack as equivalent to one hundred grams of powder cocaine for sentencing purposes. The international drug cartel I had observed during my internship had been importing truckloads of pure, undiluted cocaine. My friend Keyon had been sentenced for two kilograms of crack—the very same drug in a diluted, cheaper form. But punished one hundred times more severely.