Little sign of progress for black Americans in 2021

High-profile trials were bittersweet blips for civil rights advocates as voting rights are being restricted nationwide

A memorial to George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Reuters

Though there were small milestones in high-profile cases, the US overall remains a country turning a blind eye to institutionalised racism.

Justice was delivered for George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery after they were murdered in 2020, statues of Confederate leaders were permanently removed and a new president willing to tackle the inequities in the US justice and voting systems was inaugurated.

Reassuring as these victories might be, the US still remains a considerable distance from the harbinger of equality it is purported to be.

Black and brown Americans are still incarcerated at an alarmingly disproportionate rate, are subject to excessive police force and their access to voting is being impeded by new state-level legislation.

Federal laws aimed at tackling any one of these problems seem like a futile effort in a deeply divided Congress.

The Georgia conviction of the three white men who pursued and fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 shows that the US has made some progress despite its flawed judicial system — though the case was patently strengthened by the existence of video footage of the attack.

The three men claimed they had acted in self-defence though the graphic video evidence left the jury with no doubt that they were the ones who had instigated the deadly encounter, going as far as to chase Arbery in their trucks for over five minutes and then "trap him like rat".

“Let the words go forth all over the world that a jury of 11 whites and one black in the Deep South stood up in the courtroom and said that black lives do matter,” civil rights leader Rev Al Sharpton said at a news conference after the trial concluded in late November.

Video footage also played an important role in the trial of Derek Chauvin in April, when the ex-police officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was convicted on two counts of murder.

The widely circulated video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes sparked global protests against police brutality and racism.

Chauvin is currently serving a 22.5-year jail sentence.

But these isolated civil rights victories are few and far between.

So-called integrity

Republican states began instituting new “voting integrity” laws following the 2020 election. This year, 19 states have enacted laws restricting voting access in retaliation against the record turnout during the presidential election, the Brennan Centre for Justice said.

Some of these measures, including voting ID laws, disproportionately affect low-income racial and ethnic minorities. The ACLU reported that more than 21 million Americans do not have a government-issued photo ID, which can be costly.

Congress has so far failed to pass legislation that would bring forth systematic changes to these issues.

After entering office in 2020, President Joe Biden promised to deliver for black Americans on criminal justice, voting rights and more.

And even as Congress has not yet passed meaningful voting rights legislation, recent movements by Mr Biden suggest that could change in 2022. He recently pressed his Democratic colleagues on two voting rights bills that remain stalled because of Republican opposition.

One such bill — named in honour of the late Georgia congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis — is designed to strengthen the federal government's ability to respond to voting discrimination. That bill, paired with the Freedom to Vote Act, would expand voting access across the US.

Voting rights activist and candidate for Georgia governor Stacey Abrams wants to see action before next year's midterm elections, when the Democrats are likely to lose their razor-thin majority in Congress.

“Starting in January, when legislators come back into session in 2022, we’re going to see a maelstrom of voter suppression laws,” Ms Abrams said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“I understand the resistance to completely dismantling the filibuster. But I do believe there’s a way to restore the Senate to a working body so that things like defending democracy can actually take place.”

The new Jim Crow

Jim Crow laws were enacted between 1877 and the mid-1960s and were designed specifically to disenfranchise black Americans and keep them from voting.

US states created laws that made certain interactions with or actions by black people illegal. Blacks and whites boating together was illegal in Oklahoma in 1935 as was an integrated chess game in 1930s Alabama. And numerous blacks were arrested for eating at a whites-only lunch counter.

Today's disproportionate number of black men in the prison system has led many to call mass incarceration the new Jim Crow.

Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate as that of white Americans, reported the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy centre, with one in 81 black adults currently behind bars.

Data compiled by the NAACP show a black person is five times likelier to be stopped by police without cause compared to a white person.

The ACLU found that black Americans were nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white Americans, even though the two groups use the drug at similar rates.

“As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them,” writes professor and activist Michelle Alexander in her bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness.

Policing the police

In his first joint session of Congress, Mr Biden pressed legislators to deliver him the George Floyd Act by the anniversary of his death. The bill would have reformed policing in the US by restricting chokeholds, setting up new training procedures and holding officers accountable for committing misconduct by limiting qualified immunity.

The bill remains stalled in the Senate after bipartisan talks collapsed in September and currently has no clear path to becoming law.

And while the state of Kentucky limited the use of no-knock warrants following the death of Breonna Taylor, who was killed when police barged into the wrong house and opened fire, a similar piece of federal legislation went nowhere.

The judicial system will have its chance next year to deliver justice: former police officer Kim Potter is on trial for the death of black man Daunte Wright; the three officers who stood by while Chauvin murdered Floyd will face trial in March; and the three white men who murdered Arbery face federal civil rights charges.

Mr Biden hailed the verdicts in the Arbery trial and said the US must recommit itself to a future “where no one fears violence because of the colour of their skin” and he and his Democratic colleagues appear to be earnest in their fight to expand voting rights.

With Republicans poised to win back control of either or both chambers of Congress next year, that window is closing. If Mr Biden and congressional Democrats are to deliver on the promises they made to black Americans, they must act quickly.