The Sean Bell Verdict and the American Dilemma

The top to bottom acquittal of the three police officers in the Sean Bell case on Friday sent a shockwave through the black community in New York City. There is anger, hurt and outrage - and justifiably so. The hundreds of thousands of independent New Yorkers - black, white, Latino and Asian - who I represent and who believe in fairness and justice for all people, are deeply saddened by the verdict.

Rev. Al Sharpton, who has acted as the Bell family advisor since Sean Bell was killed, characterized the verdict at a meeting I attended the morning after the judge issued his decision as both a gain and a loss. A gain in the sense that the police officers had been indicted, and such indictments are extremely difficult to obtain; a loss, obviously, in that an innocent and unarmed young black man is dead, and the police who shot him were exonerated.

There has been progress on issues of racial justice in this city, under the firm leadership of Rev. Sharpton, of that there is no question. His voice has been passionate and consistent. He has done more to take us out of extreme polarization and recurrent racial violence than he is ever given credit for. But, as the verdict in the Bell case shows, there is much more to do.

It is no secret that black people fear and mistrust the court system. In his famous study of race relations in America in the 1940s, "An American Dilemma," the renowned Swedish academic and statesman, Gunnar Myrdal studied the criminal justice system in the American South. Journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff described Myrdal's findings thusly:

Whites tended to respect the justice system. Negroes were terrified of it. Whites were the judges, the jurors, the bailiffs, the court clerks, the stenographers, the arresting officers and the jailers...

Neither a Negro's person nor his property was safe in the courts...Whites could cheat and steal from Negroes, knowing that when it was white testimony against Negro, white almost always prevailed. Grand Jurors were notorious for seldom indicting a white man if his accuser was Negro....

Today many of those positions in the criminal justice system are filled by people of color. And because of the civil rights movement and the next generation of protest leaders like Rev. Sharpton, hard fought changes in the court system have been achieved. The Bell family relied on the promise that the wheels of justice would turn towards them. But, that was not the case. When Trent Benefield, one of Sean Bell's friends, who was injured by police fire, said of the acquittal, "They should have gotten what they deserve. If I did it, I'd be doing 25 to life," he reflected that the institutions of criminal justice are still tainted with bias against people of color and the poor, in spite of the progress made.

After Sean Bell was killed, I initiated a series of workshops, or conversations between young people from inner city communities and police officers. This project - now over a year old - is one of multiple efforts of mine to engage the cultural and social underdevelopment of Americans from so many diverse communities. These conversations are about how police officers and inner city youth perceive one another and how each could take more responsibility for how they relate to one another on street corners, outside housing projects, and at schools. But, the most striking feature of these conversations has been the extent to which the young people and the cops report having the experience of seeing one another as real human beings - rather than as individuals playing out their predetermined roles - extreme authority figures and troublemakers. That experience allowed them to connect, rather than to repel, one another.

Learning to see, to understand, and to create with those who are "other" than we are represents a new approach to developing civil society. There is the beginning of a new culture of multi-racialism in America, emerging from the bottom-up. We can see that in how Americans are living their lives, marrying, raising their kids and organizing their social lives. But, at the same time, the culture of multi-racialism is very underdeveloped. More people than ever say they want to unite the country. But the dominant culture remains one that promotes divisions. The new movement for multi-culturalism has not yet developed the capacity to intervene effectively. If we seek to create a society that is a true meld of all of its elements, we have to go through a melding process. We can't demand that everyone and every sector of society go into that process without the differences that make each one distinct.

We've seen the extraordinary institutional resistance to this kind of new multi-racialism in the presidential race this year. The controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his relationship to Barack Obama couldn't make that plainer. As many have said, Rev. Wright speaks in the language of the black church. It is not the language of all churches. Nor is it the language of all communities. But if we, as a society, reject that culture as too extreme, too outspoken, too critical, we will not open up the dialogues that can take us forward to a common ground.

When an injustice is delivered to those already suffering a loss, we naturally want to cry out and react. But at the same time, we must remember that no police department, no judge, no court of public opinion, will be fair until we can bring about the cultural and human development that takes us beyond the race-based biases that all American institutions currently contain. This is a painful truth for the black community and for all who seek justice. But we must face it and act accordingly. Even as we follow Rev. Sharpton's lead in protest, we must be sure to keep an eye on the long-term prize.