Opinion | D.C. should change the law to recognize Black children's lifetime potential - The Washington Post
Ben Crump is a civil rights lawyer. LaRuby Z. May, a Democrat who represented Ward 8 on the D.C. Council from 2015 to 2017, is a lawyer.
Most Americans would find it repugnant to value a Black child’s life lower than a White child’s, and surely no judge would overtly rule that Black lives are worth less based on the color of the person’s skin. And yet, in courtrooms throughout the country, Black children’s lives are afforded far less value than those of White children.
The same factors that keep Black children from fully realizing the American Dream and that stand as damning evidence of systemic racism are also used to minimize claims when a Black child is wrongfully killed.
Factors such as life expectancy, future earnings, future educational attainment and the parents’ careers are used to make the case that the Black child’s life wasn’t worth very much anyway. When the court was considering a civil claim in the death of Trayvon Martin, an issue was made of the fact that his father was a truck driver, discounting Trayvon’s own plans to go to college.
Under this theory, if one of us, Ben Crump, had lost his life at age 10 — a poor boy growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in Lumberton, N.C., the son of a hotel maid and a basic infantryman — the civil claim would have been a pittance, no matter how egregious the circumstances that led to this untimely death.
As documented in a report by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an organization founded at the request of President John F. Kennedy, race and gender are baked into the wage tables used to calculate damages for plaintiffs. This calculus, the report says, “deprives marginalized individuals, especially children of color, from fair compensation by perpetuating systemic inequality and failing to recognize human potential.”
In a cruel irony, the children whose skin color places their lives at greatest risk because of environmental hazards — from toxic waste, industrial and chemical plants, and unsafe drinking water such as that supplied to the children of Flint, Mich. — are also the least likely to receive proper compensation when injured. Consider these facts: More than half of those who live within 1.86 miles of toxic waste sites are people of color; almost two-thirds of the 5.7 million children who live within one mile of high-risk chemical facilities in the United States are children of color; and among children ages 1 to 5 poisoned by lead, 11.2 percent are African American children and 4 percent are Latinx children, compared with just 2.3 percent of White children.
The reliance on race and ethnicity in damage awards creates a perverted incentive for corporations to locate their toxic plants in low-income neighborhoods where Black people live, because it reduces their liability if people get hurt.
This practice is nothing new. It’s another example of the systemic racism that is built into our long-standing institutions of justice. In multiple cases dating back to the early 1900s, the courts reduced judgment awards, suggesting that African American victims are likely to live shorter lives.
As with every state but California, D.C., the seat of our nation, determines lost earning potential based on census data and surveys, which reflect gender pay gaps and other forms of workplace discrimination. This discriminatory practice fails to account for potential individual achievement and deprives women and minorities of fair compensation. Fortunately, D.C. has an imminent opportunity to correct this injustice and pass legislation to specifically prohibit the use of race, ethnicity or gender in the calculation of damages in a wrongful death or personal injury case.
The legislation — the Stormiyah Denson-Jackson Race and Gender Economic Damages Temporary Amendment Act — is named for a 12-year-old girl who died of suicide at her boarding school in 2018. In that case, the D.C. Council allowed the use of her gender, race and ethnicity to put a calculable, and reduced, value on her life. Considering that the city is 43.9 percent African American and 52.47 percent female, that means the council is literally devaluing the lives of a majority of its residents.
Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee, and his D.C. Council colleagues are dragging their feet on this important legislation. The council needs to act now to correct this injustice. From the seat of power of the greatest nation in the world, it’s time to set an example that the rest of the country can, and should, follow.
More than 230 years after the U.S. Constitution valued Black lives at three-fifths the value of White lives, it’s time to finally place equal value on people regardless of the color of their skin.
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source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/26/dc-should-change-law-recognize-black-childrens-lifetime-potential/
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