(ThyBlackMan.com) The Lady Justice statue, often seen in many courthouses, has become the most recognized symbol representing American justice. It is portrayed as a blindfolded woman carrying a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other. She represents the morality and fairness that the legal system was meant to have. The blindfold tells us that justice was intended to be blind in its impartiality and objectivity of the law.
External factors such as partisan politics, wealth, status, race, or fame should always be removed so they do not prevent the courts from executing an honest and objective process when rendering decisions. Justice does not see who is before her. This is meant to be true regardless of whether the person is rich or poor, Black or white, friend or foe; everyone gets equal treatment. Since balance is a critical factor, justice is symbolically represented by scales. The scales imply a rational process of fairness in which both sides of a case are considered even-handedly. It counters the reality of an unashamed segment of our society that believes in a “thumb on the scale” approach to justice. This unfair approach occurs when too much weight (biased influence) is placed on one side, causing the scales of justice to tilt unfairly in one direction.
Whenever something is balanced, it represents an even distribution and a healthy condition in which different elements are kept in equal proportions. When governing an economically and culturally diverse nation, a truly just society must be politically balanced. A balanced political system occurs when opposing conservative and liberal ideologies offset one another. We live in a society where a wide range of human emotions, tribalism, egos, generational traditions, apathy, complacency, exploitations, cultural influences, racial prejudices, and plain ignorance cannot always be neutralized, thereby making a consistent political balance difficult, if not impossible. Government policies can have cruel motives, resulting in serious harm to innocent people.
The United States government developed a system of checks and balances, but faces the hard truth that evil policies accepted on one side can not be balanced and offset when too many good-willed people on the other side are entrenched in their personal apathy, complacency, and ignorance. The Founding Fathers were not perfect men; many of them were enslavers, yet they drafted a U.S. Constitution that allowed subsequent corrective amendments, eventually creating a balanced system. Unfortunately, a balanced system is no good when people’s ill-willed intentions control it.
There are reasons why George Washington was called the “Father of our Nation.” In his farewell address at the end of his second term as president, Washington stated: “However [political parties] may now and then answer political ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Subverting meaning to undermine or destroy established systems by challenging their foundation and causing their downfall or ruin from within.
George Washington was correct in his prediction. Many of today’s elected leaders are, without a doubt, cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men and women whose goal is to dismantle the built-in systems of checks and balances at the detriment of people of color. One example is the Department of Education’s civil rights office (OCR). Typically, the OCR resolves dozens of racial harassment cases each year and did so even during Trump’s first administration. Given the current cultural climate in our nation, the harassment is getting bolder.
Black students, in a small district in Ohio, were called the N-word by white peers starting on their first day. They got accustomed to hearing slurs like “porch monkey” and being told to go pick cotton. At a school in Illinois, white students included Confederate flags in their PowerPoint presentation for class assignments and shook a school bus as Black students were exiting to try to make them tumble off. In each case, the OCR investigated and concluded that school districts didn’t do enough to stop racial hostility toward Black students. The OCR entered into agreements with those districts to require changes and monitor them.
The OCR resolved roughly 50 racial harassment cases. That level of accountability and justice no longer exists under the current Trump administration. Nearly a year since the second Trump administration came to power, the OCR has not entered into a single new resolution agreement involving racial harassment of students, a ProPublica analysis found. The OCR under Trump has stopped monitoring many districts the agency previously found had violated students’ civil rights. Since Jan. 20, the OCR has only opened 14 investigations into racial harassment of Black students, while over 500 racial harassment complaints were received.
The shift is clear. The “thumb on the scales” approach to justice is in effect now that the OCR has admittedly shifted to resolving cases involving allegations of discrimination against white students while openly subverting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across all facets of American life. This is what George Washington meant in 1797 by the power of the people being subverted.
Written by David W. Marshall
Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/
One may purchase his book, which is titled;
