By Dayvon Love
Historically, there have been conservative political forces that have advocated policies that are harmful to Black people, while claiming these policies are good for us.
John Calhoun, the seventh vice president of the United States, once said in 1837 that “never before has the Black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.” He said this in defense of an argument that slavery has been good for Black people.
One of the underlying beliefs that is central to the collective American consciousness is that the mere presence of White people in Black communities is helpful for our advancement in society. White folks who decide they want to help Black people tend not to be vetted due to the “White savior” narrative that is heavily propagated in this society. This dynamic has usually resulted in a perverse, parasitic and exploitative relationship between our community and the White people who claim to want to help us.
Policies that are designed to counter the dehumanization carried out by the criminal justice system against Black people are often opposed by major elements within the law enforcement establishment (prosecutors, fraternal order of police, etc). Their opposition is often framed in the context of protecting victims of crime. What is frustrating about that frame is that many of the people and political figures who oppose criminal justice reform efforts, in the name of victims of crime, are not meaningfully engaged with people in the community (non-law enforcement) that are actively fighting to address violence. In fact, there are very few places on the record (if at all) where Republicans and moderate Democrats who are opponents of substantive criminal justice reform policies have championed efforts to fight against the structural racism that defines much of the social reality of the masses of Black people.
In other words, the law enforcement establishment seems to only care about victims who are killed mostly by Black people, but not about the victims of mass incarceration. There is a tolerance for the fact that Black people are 31 percent of the state’s population but are 72 percent of Maryland prison population, that indicates a tacit belief in the disposability of working class Black people that are most vulnerable to mass incarceration.
Kurt Wolfgang is the executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims Resource Center and is a great example of how White people are able to advance a right-wing agenda, while claiming that this agenda is good for Black people. He is a long-time activist who has advocated for harsher sentences for those convicted of violent crime. He has also been a strong proponent of the death penalty. What is clear about his advocacy is that he had no awareness of the fact that the most significant impact of those policies is that it fueled mass incarceration. These policies had no substantive impact on reducing or preventing crime. There is now a mountain of evidence that substantiates the claim that police and prosecutors enforced these policies in ways that disproportionately hurt Black people.
Wolfgang’s lack of awareness is buttressed by a clear ideological commitment to a right-wing agenda. He ran for office as a Republican in Charles County, Md., in 2006. This is the same Republican Party that voted for a nominee for county board president in 2006 that used racialized dog whistle tactics in his campaign by insinuating that crime in Charles County was coming from the Black people moving in from Prince George’s County.
Wolfgang was also a member of the Coalition of the Americas, which is a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C, which counts among its founders Newt Gingrich, who famously described former President Barack Obama as a “food stamp president.” Also, in a lawsuit against the organization that he currently leads, Wolfgang was accused of racial discrimination. Specifically in the “Factual Allegations” section of the court document laying out the lawsuit, a former employee of the organization says that he made “personal Facebook posts that ‘espoused racial hatred,’ and ‘endorsed anti-Black Lives Matter posts as well as racial/hostile comments.”
Mr. Wolfgang is entitled to his perspective and opinions on political matters, but we should be clear that he has been an advocate for policies that are harmful to our community. He has been a consistent detractor in Annapolis of the Second Look Act, which would give people who have served at least 20 years of a sentence, who were between the ages of 18-25 when the offense was committed, an opportunity to have a judge assess whether their sentence should be modified.
The reality is that Black men serve 20 percent longer sentences than their White counterparts for identical convictions, and that people of color are two-thirds of the population of those serving life sentences in Maryland. The Second Look Act is not about letting criminals out of jail as Mr. Wolfgang would have you believe, but it’s about providing a tool that can address the harm done to Black people by mass incarceration. His agenda would negatively harm the communities that many of the victims of violence come from, because it is those same working class Black communities that are the primary victims of the criminal justice system.
We should care about victims of violent crime, just as much as we care about victims of police and the prison system. We do not have to pick one over the other. In fact, many of the people who have come out of prison after long sentences have been active in addressing violence in the community. Mr. Wolfgang’s advocacy is undergirded by an agenda that is predicated on, at best, indifference to the systematic oppression that Black people have faced at the hands of police and the prison system, and at worst, a desire to continue the societal dehumanization of Black people at the hands of the criminal justice system. In either case, this perspective is harmful to Black people and should be rejected by the Maryland General Assembly.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writers and not necessarily those of the AFRO.
Read more from Dayvon Love here.