I would not call today’s verdict justice, however, because justice implies true restoration, but it is accountability, which is the first step towards justice. And now the cause of justice is in your hands, and when I say, “your hands,” I mean the hands of the people of the United States.
Keith Ellison, Minnesota attorney general, speaking after the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial
“No justice, no peace.” This cry rings out at protests over the deaths of Black men, women, and even children at the hands of police officers. Stated this way, “justice” becomes shorthand for punishment or retribution against perpetrators of violence. Back in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., said more eloquently and completely, “There can be no justice without peace. And there can be no peace without justice.” King realized that justice and peace are inextricable.
But what is justice? Leviticus 24:19-20 encapsulates the ancient view: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. Ellison’s statement recognizes that there cannot be justice without restoration and reconciliation. True justice heals our wounds.
Several years ago, I heard a talk by F. W. de Klerk, the transitional leader of South Africa at the end of apartheid. He made the case that a community or nation that has experienced strife needs both truth and reconciliation. The American justice system is reasonably good at revealing truth, although there are racial and economic divides. Similarly, our justice system does a reasonable job at retribution and, occasionally, rehabilitation, again with racial and economic divides. Yet we, as a nation, have not really embraced reconciliation as a goal. For the person who has been wronged, restoration and the end of their suffering is a necessary precondition. People who are in pain can only cry out for retribution, to share their pain. Consider the ancient Israelites who had been exiled by Babylon:
8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Psalm 137:8-9
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
Not a verse that is preached very often! But it is a true statement of grief and anger. The people were hurting. Their land and their nationhood had been taken away. Their holy temple had been destroyed. In a similar way, Black communities across the nation still feel grief and anger over the centuries of oppression they have endured. Until they are restored to equality, how can they enter into full community with the rest of American society?
What would justice be like for Cubans in Florida? Some Cubans are recent immigrants, refugees escaping the poverty and oppression of their Communist government. Others fled Cuba during the revolution in 1953. These were wealthy Cubans whose property was stolen by the Communists, and who, like the Israelites, lost their land and their nationhood. Although individuals who experienced this catastrophe are a small fraction of modern-day Cuban-Americans, the memory runs deep in that community and continues to impact US-Cuba relations. At this point, restoring their property is meaningless. Cuba has changed; Cuban-Americans are much better off than the typical Cuban. Yet that loss is still real and painful.
Achieving true justice requires peace and reconciliation. But achieving reconciliation requires first an acknowledgment of wrongdoing and a willingness to restore what has been lost. If there is to be peace in America’s Black communities, there must first be repentance by the White power structures that perpetuate injustice, that have created wealth and educational attainment disparities, that treat Blacks as a problem to be eliminated instead of people who deserve equality.