Equal Justice & Biblical Justice: A Conversation on Race

(Source: Evangelicals for Social Action)

If you have not yet watched the film "The Hate U Give” which is a story about a teenage African-American girl who goes to a majority-Caucasian preparatory school in a rich, affluent neighborhood while residing in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, then you should. In the film, Starr, the main character, witnesses her teenage friend Khalil fall as a shooting victim at a traffic stop at the hands of a white police officer. The film is an insightful look into the race issues that are pervasive in our society.

I am currently doing my senior thesis paper on racial disparities in criminal sentencing, and the findings are alarming. Racial disparities and inequalities are rampant in our system and have been for a long period of time. I will admit that I was not aware of how bad the issue was until I watched the Netflix Documentary “13th” and started doing research for this assignment. Here are some statistics from my research that will paint a picture of how racial minorities are disproportionately treated in our criminal justice system.

- Black men got 19.1 percent longer sentences for the same federal crimes as white men between the years 2012 and 2016 (vox.com)

- In 2016, black Americans comprised 27% of all individuals arrested in the United States—double their share of the total population. Black youth accounted for 15% of all U.S. children yet made up 35% of juvenile arrests in that year (The Sentencing Project).

- In 2001, black men had a 35% projected lifetime chance of serving time in prison. (Bureau of Justice Statistics)

- Of the 1900 wrongfully convicted and exonerated defendants in 2016, 47% of the them were African-American (National Registry of Exonerations)

These findings are just a few examples of a larger systemic problem in our society. Bryan Stevenson, a Christian defense attorney who advocates for people facing death row, rightly says that to end the issues plaguing our society we must be concerned with justice. And that is why I am writing today. We must preserve the Kingdom of God here on earth and one of the means of preservation is justice.

Justice is not just a moral value but a biblical necessity. Scripture speaks of the importance of justice in both The Old & New Testament and Jesus’ life was a model of a life worth imitating, for He was a preserver of justice. The story of Isaiah is a story of redemption for God’s chosen elect, and their deliverance from oppression to a fulfillment of salvation. When Moses led the Israelites towards the promised land, God promised them an experience of what true life looks like, of a relationship with a God that would be just and merciful. When Jesus walked into the temple and flipped the tables, it was a form of protest, an action of calling out the sins and brokenness of society in attempt to bring about justice.

Jesus references justice in Luke in the parable of the unjust judge when He says “And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” This is a call and a plea from Jesus for his disciples to not only trust that justice and redemption will come but that there must be faith for when the Son of Man comes because the irony was that the Son of Man was already present among God’s children.

I spoke in my last blog “No Exceptions” of the presence of brokenness and fixing brokenness with God’s forgiving power of redemption. Redemption is the act of being saved from evil and oppression. Justice is rooted in redemption. For this reason, we are called to enact and conserve justice on earth. The racial problems that are in front of us are just a select of many injustices that Christians are called to address and correct. One important way to go about this is to have the important conversation about race and to become informed of just how serious these discrepancies are. Once we are informed, we can move forward in discussing solutions, methods of support, and most importantly ways to show love. For there can be no justice without redemption, and no redemption without love. For God so loved the world that he created you in His image with no exceptions. No exceptions mean not only loving but pursuing justice for all to preserve what God intended for his creation to be.