“I’m not systemically racist – I’m a new racist,” said Detroit Judge Kathleen Ryan. “If you’re an American Black person then you’re a f****** lazy piece of s***.” After 13 years on the bench, Ryan was removed after a colleague secretly exposed her phone conversations. But Ryan wasn’t a “bad apple.”
In Detroit, Judge Kenneth King had a Black girl handcuffed over a “bad attitude.” In 2021, an Ohio judge threatened a 21-year-old Black man with prison time if he didn’t get the Covid vaccine. A Florida judge went viral in 2019 for sentencing another young Black man to jail for missing jury duty.
Systemic anti-Blackness isn’t just in police precincts and prisons. Cops are our first contact. But judges, usually white, help keep us imprisoned in a system built on the criminalization of Blackness. A Cambridge study found that “white judges issue incarceration sentences in 50% of cases with Black defendants,” 34% for whites. Black judges aren’t far behind.
In Detroit, Black people are jailed 3.5 times more than whites and twice as likely to be electronically monitored. Judges also defang attempts to target systemic injustice, with another report finding white federal judges “about four times more likely to dismiss race discrimination cases outright.”
Judges are supposed to be fair. But as gatekeepers of anti-Black law, they play their own critical role in the spectacle of punishment.