The most devastating effect of the Trump era has been his unwavering commitment to de-humanizing brown people as “animals,” the human tragedy of ripping babies from their families at the border, and the way he has unleashed white America to show its true racist and hateful colors. This is stuff straight out of the Nazi playbook, and it’s foolish to think that all of these deplorable people who have been inspired to feel good about themselves by Trump are going to recede back into the dark corners of society. The #MAGA hats will have to be fought before they can be silenced.
But the most lasting effect of the Trump regime is surely its ability to pack the courts with the kinds of racist judges conservatives have always wanted.
A new study from Harvard Law School means that I don’t even have to pretend that Republican-appointed judges are race-neutral. They’re not. We’ve always known they’re not. Now there are some stats for those who have trouble believing that white supremacy is as obvious as black people know it to be.
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Adam Liptak reports on the findings in the New York Times:
Judges appointed by Republican presidents gave longer sentences to black defendants and shorter ones to women than judges appointed by Democrats, according to a new study that analyzed data on more than half a million defendants.
“Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants to three more months than similar nonblacks and female defendants to two fewer months than similar males compared with Democratic-appointed judges,” the study found, adding, “These differences cannot be explained by other judge characteristics and grow substantially larger when judges are granted more discretion.”
Duh? Again, it’s not news to most black people that racist people appoint racist judges. Most of us have been trying to tell you this since y’all allowed us to speak without being whipped. But I suppose Liptak speaks for many whites when he feigns surprise:
It has long been known that there is an overall racial sentencing gap, with judges of all political affiliations meting out longer sentences to black offenders. The new study confirmed this, finding that black defendants are sentenced to 4.8 months more than similar offenders of other races.
It was also well known, and perhaps not terribly surprising, that Republican appointees are tougher on crime over all, imposing sentences an average of 2.4 months longer than Democratic appointees.
But the study’s findings on how judges’ partisan affiliations affected the racial and gender gaps were new and startling.
“The racial gap by political affiliation is three months, approximately 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap,” the authors wrote. “We also find that Republican-appointed judges give female defendants two months less in prison than similar male defendants compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap.”
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I can’t even muster outrage here. We live in a racist society. One party is actually proud of the racism it supports. When that party is in power, it uses its power to engender structural racism, with a side of sexist paternalism, into the very bones of the system.
Are white people going to read this report and do anything different? Are they going to vote differently? I doubt it. The, uhh, “economic anxiety” affects white people too strongly, I guess.
Whatever. Next time I say “Republican judges are racist,” I get to add a link. The study will definitely make at least some spineless “both sides” white men tweet out “wow.”
This oppression is killing me inside.
Black Defendants Get Longer Sentences From Republican-Appointed Judges, Study Finds [New York Times]
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.