from the moment summer duskin arrived at carver collegiate academy in new orleans last fall

8/10/2019 From the Moment Summer Duskin Arrived at Carver Collegiate Academy in New Orleans Last Fall

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From the moment Summer Duskin arrived at Carver Collegiate Academy in New Orleans last fall, she struggled to

keep track of all the rules. There were rules governing how she talked. She had to say thank you constantly,

including when she was given the opportunityas the school handbook put itto answer questions in class.

And she had to communicate using scholar talk, which the school defined as complete, grammatical sentences

with conventional vocabulary. When students lapsed, they were corrected by a teacher and asked to repeat the

amended statement.

There were rules governing how Summer moved. Teachers issued demerits when students leaned against a wall,

or placed their heads on their desks. (The penalty for falling asleep was 10 demerits, which triggered a detention;

skipping detention could warrant a suspension.) Teachers praised students for shaking hands firmly, sitting up

straight, and tracking the designated speaker with their eyes. The 51 -page handbook encouraged students to

twist in their chairs or whip their necks around to follow whichever classmate or teacher held the floor. Closed

eyes carried a penalty of two demerits. The rules did not ease up between classes: students had to walk single file

between the wall and a line marked with orange tape.

And there were, predictably, rules governing how Summer dressed. Carver Collegiates coed code called for khaki

pants pulled up to the hip; a black or brown leather (or imitation-leather) belt; a school-issued polo shirt with the

collar turned down; a white or black undershirt; and no hats, sunglasses, sparkles, flash, or bling of any kind.

Students could be barred from class for wearing the wrong kind of shoe, such as the popular Air Jordans; the code

mandated specific colors, styles, and brands, Adidas and Chuck Taylor among them.

Summer was a high-school freshman, 14 years old. It felt like I was in elementary school, she said, where in fact

she had had it easy by New Orleans standards: shed been spared the silent lunches and embarrassing

punishments her peers at some other schools had endured. At Carver, Summer quietly rejoiced whenever she

discovered a way to assert her individuality without breaking code, like wearing purple lipstick.

Over the past two decades, hundreds of elementary and middle schools across the country have embraced an

uncompromisingly stern approach to educating low-income students of color. But only more recently have some of

the charter networks that helped popularize strictness, including the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), opened

high schoolsan expansion that has tested the model in new, and divisive, ways. Theres no official name for this

type of school, and not all of the informal terms please the educators in charge: the ethos is often described as no

excuses, paternalistic, or devoted to sweating the small stuff. The schools, most of them urban charters, sharean aversion to even minor signs of disorder and a pressing need to meet the test-based achievement standards of

the No Child Left Behind era or else find themselves shuttered. Front and center in their defense of intensive

regimentation for their predominantly minority students is a stirring goal beyond that bottom line: to send all their

graduates, many of them first-generation college aspirants, on to higher education.

Yet a growing array of critics is concerned that the no-excuses approach more effectively contributes to very

different results: a flagrant form of two-tiered education and a rise in racially skewed suspension and expulsion

rates for low-level misbehaviora trend that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has railed against repeatedly

over the past year. Some go further, arguing that those taped lines point the way to prison rather than to college

that the harsh discipline is a civil-rights abomination, destined to push too many kids out of school and into trouble

with the law. For the families involved, particularly the students, the story is more complicated. Many of them

come to appreciate the intense structure, but only if they also come to trust the mostly young educators who

enforce it. As school leaders in New Orleans are discovering, forging that trust is far harder than teaching someone

to say thank you and toe an orange line.

Ben Kleban, the founder and CEO of New Orleans College Prep, grew concerned about a suspension rate that

exceeded 50 percent, and began rethinking disciplinary policies.

New Orleans schools, which have taken the experiment with paternalistic public education to a new extreme, have

been at the forefront of extending regimented discipline to the high-school level. After Hurricane Katrina

devastated the region in 2005, the city became a proving ground for the most popular and contentious reforms.


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The charter-school movement grew, spreading a heavy reliance on alternative teacher-recruiting programs like

Teach for Americaand, not least, a commitment to comprehensive, punitive discipline policies very different

from the pedagogical flexibility and emphasis on individual expression favored by many traditional education

schools.

In step with an energetic breed of charter advocates nationally, the reformers who descended on New Orleans

were convinced that progressive pedagogy and discipline had an especially sorry record in low-income districts,where many children faced more than their share of disorder and violence. Chaotic classrooms, the newcomers

argued, were a major reason schools floundered and failed. The controversial broken-windows theorywhich

holds that a firm response to minor signs of disarray, like broken windows, is essential to inhibiting more-serious

criminal activitywas the reigning analogy, invoked by top administrators on down. No infraction was too small to

address. A uniform violation, I heard one high-school teacher remark, means a broken window, which means a

broken path to college.

There was no better place to apply this theory than New Orleans, where, the year before Katrina, about two-thirds

of schools failed to meet Louisianas standards for acceptable performance, defined largely by test scores. By one

estimate, based on a combination of local, state, and federal data, 5 percent of the citys black public -school

students went on to graduate from college. Former students and teachers told too many stories of decrepit

buildings where hallways reeked of marijuana, burned-out teachers slept through class, frightened students

carried weapons for self-protection, and few people talked about college.

Almost a decade has passed since reformers began overhauling the school system, and academic performance has

improved citywide: nearly two-thirds of students in grades three through eight currently meet state proficiency

standards. Graduation-rate data, several researchers agree, still arent solid enough to cite. Yet along with the

growth in achievement has come plenty of debate about what is driving it. As New Orleans students who entered

kindergarten after Katrina make their way into the citys new high schools, Summer Duskin isnt the only one

questioning the doctrinaire approach to discipline. Some educators themselves are wondering whether it has

become an obstacle to progress.

The backlash against no-excuses discipline in high school

Erin Lockley at first bridled at her schools stern tactics, but now, in her senior year at Cohen College Prep, she feelsthe approach can work if students are given more of a voice as they get older.

Idealistic and ambitious young charter-school leaders like Ben Kleban and Ben Marcovitz arrived in New Orleans as

fervent believers in an unwaveringly firm approach. In 20078, if a student had a stripe on their sock or a mark on

a shoe, there was a consequence, says Kleban, who was 27 when he founded New Orleans College Prep seven

years ago, admitting sixth-graders who this year became the first batch of 12th-grade graduates at Klebans high

school, Cohen College Prep. As a student named Erin Lockley quickly discovered upon her entry into New Orleans

College Prep in 2008, her teachers meant business. After hastily pulling on a green undershirt on the first day,

rather than the requisite black or white one, she was barred from class until she changed itand she had to write

out her multiplication tables (from one to 14) 10 times that night as punishment.

Ben Marcovitznow 35 and the CEO of Collegiate Academies, which runs three charter high schools, among them

Carver Collegiate, Summers schoolembraced stringent discipline and character education, too, when he

launched the first of his trio, Sci Academy, in 2008. And in 2010, KIPP opened a high school in New Orleans, among

the first for the charter network, which initially focused just on the middle grades and now encompasses more

than 160 schools nationally. As part of its college pushKIPPs current, ambitious target is bachelors degrees for

three-quarters of its graduatesthe network decided to extend its hyper-structured approach straight up to the

college door.

At the inaugural parents meeting, in late August of 2010, the administrators of the new KIPP high school, called

Renaissance, didnt have a hard sell. Dozens of eager mothers, plus a few fathers, had climbed two flights of stairs

on that sweltering evening to listen to the schools 31 -year-old principal, Brian Dassler, describe his vision for the


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And the zealous disciplinary tactics at the paternalistic charters that are overrepresented in poor urban districts

contribute to persistent racial gaps in students experience. Starting in preschool, black children are suspended and

expelled at far higher rates than white students are, despite little objective evidence that they behave any worse.

The discrepancy persists as children get older and the number of overall suspensions rises. In high school, black

students are more than three times as likely as white students to get suspended at least once. Untangling

causation and correlation is obviously no easy matter, but one statewide study in Texas reported that students

suspended or expelled for a discretionary violationhaving a bad attitude, for examplewere nearly threetimes as likely to come into contact with the juvenile-justice system the following year. Ramifications like these

have spurred several large urban districts (Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago) to take aggressive measures over the

past couple of years to curb discretionary discipline tactics. Schools have begun banning suspensions, for instance,

for vaguely defined offenses like willful defiance, which can contribute to the troubling racial disparities, several

experts have concluded.

In New Orleans, too, alarming numbers have begun to prompt challenges to and reassessments of charters no-

excuses regimens. In 201213, their first academic year, Carver Collegiate and its sister school in Ben Marcovitzs

trio, Carver Prep, led local high schools in suspension ratesthis in a city where suspending more than a fifth of a

schools students each year is not uncommon. At Carver Collegiate the figure was 69 percent, and at Carver Prep it

was 61 percent; the national average for high schools was 11 percent. School officials said 80 percent of

suspensions lasted for just a single day. Yet several students complained that they were sometimes sent home off

the books, with nobody documenting the dismissal and minimal or no inquiry into the circumstances that led t o

the misbehavior. Disputing their accounts, Marcovitz emphasizes that Collegiate Academies strives to be as

accurate as possible with its data. At KIPP Renaissance, the discipline so eagerly welcomed soon proved

ineffectual, and many parents support eroded. Several years after he founded New Orleans College Prep, Ben

Kleban became disturbed by a suspension rate that exceeded 50 percent as his first students made their way into

Cohen College Prep High School.

Some have called the problem the progress trap: when systems designed to help students catch up start holding

them back instead. As Elizabeth Green recounts in her new book, Building a Better Teacher, educators in some

charter schools around the country quietly began questioning the rigidly rule-based mentalityin themselves and

in their studentsaround the time reform in New Orleans was getting under way. If mutely regimented middle-

school students turned into rowdy bus riders a couple of years later, what did that say about the no-excuses

theory in practice? The students were testing boundaries, as of course older kids do, yet the no -excuses culturewas intended to be cumulative. The overarching goal was not to exact obedience for obediences sake, or merely

to chalk up short-term gains in test scores, and it certainly was not to encourage teachers to be tyrants. The point

was to develop increasing self-control in students en route to graduation. In college, after all, the ability to think

critically and navigate coursework independently counts for much more than reflexive compliance.

The backlash against no-excuses discipline in high school

Kleban, who faced a 62 percent suspension rate at Cohen College Prep in 201112, found himself reexamining the

behavior policies at his charter chain with such concerns in mind: he wanted to prepare his oldest students for

autonomywithout scaling back too much on structure. Besides, suspensions werent working for many students.

Fourteen percent of students were barred from campus just once, a single suspension was all it took to jolt them

into improved behavior; another 13 percent were suspended twice. But 35 percent of students were sent home

three times or more; they clearly werent getting the message.

Theres avalue in being consistent, Kleban says, and the no-excuses and zero-tolerance approaches have the

benefit of clear-cut implementationa tidy matrix or rule book. But the reality is, kids are different, and

problems arise when students feel like something is being done to them and they dont understand why. At

Cohen, the principal and other administrators held town-hall meetings where they solicited students views on

school rules, and then hammered out compromises. The student government drafted a new outerwear policy

(more sweatshirt options) and spelled out the penalties for breaking the revised rules. Behind the scenes, the

principal has gotten to know the students well enough to customize discipline when appropriateoverlook a


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uniform violation, for example, and help a student get an item of clothing when a family is going through a rough

patch financially. School officials also inaugurated extracurricular activities students said they wanted, along with

more pep rallies and other celebratory events.

Erin Lockley, who had bridled at the punishment for wearing the wrong undershirt as a sixth-grader, is now a

senior who credits the no-nonsense ethos with teaching her self-discipline. She feels the approach can work if

students are given a voice, particularly as they get older. Teachersmost of the time coming from New York orfurther out, she saysunderstand that they have to meet us halfway. Sometimes thats as simple as talking less

and listening more. Kleban and his staff still wrestle with the appropriate balance of structure and flexibility. But he

says he hears fewer complaints about the charter networks disciplinary practices. And by 201314, the suspension

rate at Cohen had fallen to 37 percent, with the proportion of repeat offenders plummeting.

A rocky first year at KIPP Renaissance exposed the discipline matrix as no guarantee of the orderly school parents

had been hoping for. Brice was an extreme: a repeat offender who eventually goaded a frustrated young principal

to enforce a 45day suspension, a rare move at even the strictest schoolsand a patently risky one. As Brice

himself could have predicted, a month and a half at loose ends all but ensured that he would fall deeper into a

dangerous scene in his neighborhood, which he did. He returned to school, but soon ended up in jail, and has been

in and out of prison ever since. KIPP, meanwhile, has struggled with staff turnoverfive principals (among them,

one interim and two who shared the role)further eroding something no less important than disciplinary

consistency: a sense of a school community. A spokesperson for KIPP New Orleans says the school has made

significant progress in staff retention over the past year, and adds that the school has modified its disciplinary

practices, learning from past mistakes. With the goal of suspending students only as a last resort, a team of

administrators now decides whether the move is warranted. The suspension rate has fallen dramatically, and

Renaissance, he says, is in a very different place thanit was in 2010.

At Collegiate Academies, where Summer Duskin had balked at strictures she felt shed outgrown, Ben Marcovitz

has been struggling too. On the positive side, he points to Sci Academy, the first high school in his network, as

proof of success: though attrition has been high (its initial class shrank 37 percent over the schools first two years),

some of the students who make it through end up acceptingeven appreciatingthe strictness, and more than 90

percent go on to graduate and enroll in college. Yet last winter, Marcovitz and his staff faced a series of student

protests at Carver Prep and Carver Collegiate. At the same time, a civil-rights complaint filed by students and

parents asked state, federal, and local authorities to investigate the schools disciplinary policies, alleging abuse ofstudents with special needs and overuse of suspensions for trivial matters. Marcovitz says the allegations were

shocking to me and completely uncharacteristic of our entire philosophy and approach.

Summerwho had received countless demerits and three out-of-school suspensions in her first semester as a

freshmanwas among the roughly 60 students who walked over to a nearby park wearing orange wristbands that

read Let me explain. In a letter of demands she helped write, the teenagers lamented, We get disciplined for

anything and everything. High on their list of complaints were the stiff penalties for failing to follow the taped

lines in the hallways, for slouching, for not raising their hands with ramrod-straight elbows. The teachers and

administrators tell us this is because they are preparing us for college, the students wrote. If college is going to

be like Carver, we dont want to go to college.

Marcovitz believes some of the students claims were exaggerated, and he makes a point of noting the praise that

counters the stern rebukes, the warmth that accompanies the structure. But by the summer, he was ready to

tackle what he casts as the next challenge in the reform project: if Sci Academy was evidence of what stringent

discipline could help achieve, now his high schools would pursue the same results through gentler means. While it

was extremely tough to hear so much concern about our program, we took it as a mandate from the community,

he says, and maintains that high suspension rates already had his attention. He committed the Collegiate

Academies leaders to zero out-of-school suspensions in the 201415 school year. We dont know how to do this

yet, Marcovitz admitted before classes began. There will inevitably be stumbles, he acknowledged, as they

explore an array of alternatives, from partnerships with juvenile-justice groups in the city to restorative justice

strategies that get students talking through problems rather than simply paying penalties. The new ethos will


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require relationships being very clearly built and love being very clearly expressed. But apart from that, he and

his staff are forging ahead largely without a rule book, and so far they report having issued a handful of

suspensions.

The change came too late for Summer, who had already transferred to McDonogh 35, which opened nearly a

century ago as the citys first public high school for black students. Many of the citys young school reformers

dismiss the contemporary McDonogh 35 as chaotic and poorly run, and its academic reputation has slipped inrecent years. But its legendary historyErnest Nathan Morial, the citys first black mayor, was one of many local

African American leaders nurtured within its wallsundergirds an ethos of pride and engaged purpose that

Summer and her family had lost sight of at Carver Collegiate. The strictness wasnt the main issue, at least not for

Summers fatherhe attended an all-boys Catholic high school in New Orleans that was, if anything, stricter. The

problem, as he puts it, is that I cant get my mind around these folks to see whats the point. School

disciplinarians had failed to cultivate a shared sense of direction and the trust that goes with it. When that

happens, he agrees with his daughter, even the most well-intentioned system can end up feeling like a blind

application of rules.

Childrens fictionin literature and in filmfaces a curious challenge: Adults usually write the story, dream up the

characters, and try, in a somewhat circuitous way, to teach children lessons they believe children should be taught.

Given that fact, creating scary childrens fiction is an even more curious challenge: Many adult writers pull back

from fully covering themes they deem inappropriate or too scary for young readers, by giving their stories happy

endings and clearly drawn lines between the "good" and "bad" characters. That way, kids have no confusion about

what's right and what's wrong.

"It's an understandable impulse," Deborah Stevenson, the director of the Center for Children's Books at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says. "We want to protect kids."

In The Squickerwonkers, actress Evangeline Lilly tries to break the pattern. The book, out Tuesday, is the first in her

debut children's series about the adventures of a motley crew of marionette-like beings, each representing a vice:

Theres Papa the Proud, Mama the Mean, Andy the Arrogant, and six other members of the Squickerwonkers

family.

Selma on the cover

Photo by: Titan Books

And these guys are creepy. Theyre button-eyed and bursting at the seams. The lone human character, the

protagonist Selma, isnt any better. She looks like a wide-eyed little girl, but her appearance is unnatural, adding to

the books sinisteraesthetic. Lillys story is just as eerie: It begins with Selma entering an abandoned wagon before

meeting each of the Squickerwonkers. Soon after their introduction, they pop her balloon, and turn her into one of

their own, complete with button eyes and strings holding her upa thoroughly upsetting ending. But thats just

fine by Lilly.

Theres been a trend for a very long time where childrens storybooks are very careful and very meek and have to

have happy endings, but those happy endings are only for good people, she tells me. The world isnt that

simple.

Dark childrens stories aren't new (think Neil Gaiman, Lemony Snicket, or Roald Dahl), but the past few months

have seen a resurgence in telling tales for children that blend pure horror with age-appropriate themes. Lillys

book mixes creepy characters with lighthearted language (the book is written in limericks). Septembers The

Boxtrolls, based on Alan Snows Here Be Monsters!, used cartoonish character design to offset the fact that the

plot follows an orphaned boy who lives with underground monsters. And Octobers Guillermo Del Toro-

produced The Book of Lifeabout a man who dies for his belovedtakes place in fantastical settings.


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Why scare children, though? Its about helping them deal with and understand their own fears. And that's not easy

to do. "The really challenging concept [for authors] is to illustrate the emotions that might be negative," Stevenson

says, "like anxiety, grief, and fear.

Scary children's stories should help them deal with and understand their own fear.

Illustrating those emotions, Stevenson says, means getting the characters right. Lillys Squ ickerwonkers, for

example, present duality between the good and the bad in every persona duality that can help children questionwhats right and whats wrong. Her characters may be outcasts, but theyre not, as Lilly puts it, malicious or

malevolent, just unaware of themselves. They may be menacing in appearance with their doll-like designs, but

theyre also lively and warmly lit by illustrator Johnny Fraser-Allen, bringing to mind a carnival instead of a haunted

house.

What the Squickerwonkers are really dealing with and talking to children about is human nature, the not-so-

pretty sides of human nature, Lilly says. Children are oblivious to their own vices, and thats why they can hurt

each other so badly. If children are not familiar with them, theyll just be afraid of them and confused by them and

ashamed of them.

In The Boxtrolls, a character named Mr. Pickles starts out as a henchman of sorts for the antagonist, but doesnt

realize it, convincing himself hes good. As the film progresses, herealizes hes notmaking him neither good

nor bad. As Dan Harmon put it in his letter to a little girl who had gotten nightmares after watching Monster

House, for which he had co-written the screenplay:

There should always be something inside a monster that helps you understand it, and makes you less scared of it,

and able to make the monster go away. Not just a bunch of stuff that makes you more confused and scared.

But having a multi-layered character isnt the only step to constructively tap into childrens fear. Building a creative

world, according to Stevenson, is just as important. Adults may like the idea of books as a safe place away from

the real things, she says, But you cant expect a child to never deal with fear if theyve never encountered it.

Writing for children means emotionally engaging on their level.In other words, writing for children means emotionally engaging on their level. Sometimes, that takes creating a

fantastical world that, however fearsome it may be, allows children to explore. Theres a weirdness that should be

captured: The Book of Life uses the land of the dead as a setting, something inherently horrific for children to think

about. (The film itself grasps this. In one scene, a child character listening to the story exclaims, What kind of story

is this? Were just kids!) To offset the horror, the film uses elaborate and colorful art direction.

Maurice Sendaks Where the Wild Things Are, Stevenson says, effectively demonstrates this idea. The books art

built a palatable world, an idea Sendak explained in 1964 while accepting the American Library Associations

Caldecott Medal presentation:

*Its+ an awful fact of childhood The fact of *a childs+ vulnerability to fear, anger, hate, frustrationall the

emotions that are an ordinary part of their lives and that they can only perceive as dangerous, ungovernable

forces. To master these forces, children turn to fantasy: that imaginary world where disturbing emotional

situations are solved to their satisfaction.

Scaring and disturbing children is essentialbut it has to be done right. Its not about scaring the crap out of them,

its letting them explore a world that only horror can introduce, and opening up that genre to find out what is truly

scary, what is creepy, and even what is downright funny to them about these stories.


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Writing a dark story, its not because I want to horrify children, Lilly says. I want it to be weird and strange and

creepy and quirky. [The books] will lead to a discussion for parents to have with their kids, like What can we learn

from our vices and how can we handle them?

IN my column a week ago, When Whites Just Dont Get It, I took aim at what I called smug white delusion

about race relations in America, and readers promptly fired back at what they perceived as a smugly deluded

columnist.

Readers grudgingly accepted the grim statistics I cited such as the wealth disparity between blacks and whites in

America today exceeding what it was in South Africa during apartheid but many readers put the blame on

African-Americans themselves.

Probably has something to do with their unwillingness to work, Nils tweeted.

Nancy protested on my Facebook page: We cant fix their problems. Its up to every black individual to stop the

cycle of fatherless homes, stop the cycle of generations on welfare.

There was a deluge of such comments, some toxic, but let me try to address three principal arguments that I think

prop up white delusion.

First, if blacks are poor or in prison, its all their fault. Blacks dont get it, Bruce tweeted. Choosing to be cool vs.

getting good grades is a bad choice. We all start from 0.

Huh? Does anybody really think that we all take off from the same starting line?

Slavery and post-slavery oppression left a legacy of broken families, poverty, racism, hopelessness and internalized

self-doubt. Some responded to discrimination and lack of opportunity by behaving in self-destructive ways.

One study found that African-American children on welfare heard only 29 percent as many words in their first few

years as children of professional parents. Those kids never catch up, partly because theyre more likely to attend

broken schools. Sure, some make bad choices, but theyve often been on a trajectory toward failure from the time

they were babies.

These are whirlpools that are difficult to escape, especially when society is suspicious and unsympathetic. Japan

has a stigmatized minority group, the burakumin, whose members once held jobs considered unclean. But

although this is an occupational minority rather than a racial one, it spawned an underclass that was tormented by

crime, educational failure, and substance abuse similar to that of the American underclass.

So instead of pointing fingers, lets adopt some of the programs that Ive cited with robust evidence showing that

they bridge the chasm.

But look at Asians, Mark protests on my Google Plus page: Vietnamese arrived in poverty and are now school

valedictorians. Why cant blacks be like that?

There are plenty of black valedictorians. But bravo to Asians and other immigrant groups for thriving in America

with a strong cultural emphasis on education, diligence and delay of self-gratification. We should support

programs with a good record of inculcating such values in disadvantaged children. But we also need to understand

that many young people of color see no hope of getting ahead, and that despair can be self-fulfilling.

A successful person can say: I worked hard in school. I got a job. The system worked. Good for you. But you

probably also owe your success to parents who read to you, to decent schools, to social expectations that you


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After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I wrote a couple of columns entitled When Whites Just

Dont Get It. The reaction to those columns sometimes bewildered, resentful or unprintable suggests to me

that many whites in America dont understand the depths of racial inequity lingering in this country.

This inequity is embedded in our law enforcement and criminal justice system, and that is why Bryan Stevenson

may, indeed, be Americas Mandela. For decades he has fought judges, prosecutors and police on behalf of those

who are impoverished, black or both. When someone is both and caught in the maw of the justice system well,Stevenson jokes that its like having two kinds of cancer at the same time.

We have a system that treats you better if youre rich and guilty than if youre poor and innocent, he adds.

Stevenson, 54, grew up in a poor black neighborhood in Delaware and ended up at Harvard Law School. He started

the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala ., to challenge bias and represent the voiceless. Its a tale he

recounts in a searing, moving and infuriating memoir that is scheduled to be published later this month, Just

Mercy.

Stevenson tells of Walter McMillian, a black Alabama businessman who scandalized his local community by having

an affair with a married white woman. Police were under enormous pressure to solve the murder of an 18-year-old

white woman, and they ended up arresting McMillian in 1987.

The authorities suppressed exculpatory evidence and found informants to testify against McMillian with

preposterous, contradictory and constantly changing stories. McMillian had no serious criminal history and had an

alibi: At the time of the murder, he was at a church fish fry, attended by dozens of people who confirmed his

presence.

None of this mattered. An overwhelmingly white jury found McMillian guilty of the murder, and the judge

inauspiciously named Robert E. Lee Key Jr. sentenced him to die.

When Stevenson sought to appeal on McMillians behalf, Judge Key called him up. Why in the hell would you

want to represent someone like Walter McMillian? the judge asked, according to Stevensons account.

Stevenson dug up evidence showing that McMillian couldnt have committed the crime, and prosecuting witnessesrecanted their testimony, with one saying that he had been threatened with execution unless he testified against

McMillian. Officials shrugged. They seemed completely uninterested in justice as long as the innocent man on

death row was black.

Despite receiving death threats, Stevenson pursued the case and eventually won: McMillian was exonerated and

freed in 1993 after spending six years on death row.

I suggested to Stevenson that such a blatant and racially tinged miscarriage of justice would be less likely today. On

the contrary, he said, such cases remain common, adding that he is currently representing a prisoner in Alabama

who has even more evidence of innocence than McMillian had.

If anything, because of the tremendous increase in people incarcerated, Im confident that we have more

innocent people in prison today than 25 years ago, Stevenson said.

Those of us who are white and in the middle class rarely see this side of the justice system. The system works for

us, and its easy to overlook how deeply it is skewed against the poor or members of minority groups.

Yet consider drug arrests. Surveys overwhelmingly find that similar percentages of blacks and whites use illegal

drugs. Yet the Justice Department says that blacks are arrested for such drug offenses at three times the rate of

whites.


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One study in Seattle found that blacks made up 16 percent of observed drug dealers for the five most dangerous

drugs and 64 percent of arrests for dealing those drugs.

Likewise, research suggests that blacks and whites violate traffic laws at similar rates, but blacks are far more likely

to be stopped and arrested. The Sentencing Project, which pushes for fairer law enforcement, cites a New Jersey

study that racial minorities account for 15 percent of drivers on the turnpike, but blacks account for 42 percent of

stops.

THE greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who

believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them. Too many whites

unquestioningly accept a system that disproportionately punishes blacks and that gives public schools serving

disadvantaged children many fewer resources than those serving affluent children. We are not racists, but we

accept a system that acts in racist ways.

Some whites think that the fundamental problem is young black men who show no personal responsibility, screw

up and then look for others to blame. Yes, that happens. But I also see a white-dominated society that shows no

sense of responsibility for disadvantaged children born on a path that often propels them toward drugs, crime and

joblessness; we fail those kids before they fail us, and then we, too, look for others to blame.

Today we sometimes wonder how so many smart, well-meaning white people in the Jim Crow era could have

unthinkingly accepted segregation. The truth is that injustice is easy not to notice when it affects people different

from ourselves; that helps explain the obliviousness of our own generation to inequity today. We need to wake up.

And that is why we need a Mandela in this country.

2014 The New York Times Company.

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from the moment summer duskin arrived at carver collegiate academy in new orleans last fall

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