Is Justice the administration of punishment for crimes and misdemeanors?

What does racial justice mean? Are Blacks, Hispanics, Asians or Whites guilty or innocent? How exactly?

  • is everyone with White ancestry guilty of crimes against minorities?

  • is everyone with Black ancestry innocent? a victim? Does actual ancestry even matter?

  • are today’s Germans guilty of the Holocaust?

  • is every Southerners (or even Northerner?) guilty of the sin slavery and the genocide on Native Americans?

To me, justice should be justice. It should be blind with respect to all of us. Guilt and innocence should not be racial. They should be universal.

Guilt and innocence should apply only to individuals, not to races. In the words of Fritz Bauer, we can only be proud of the good things that we have done ourselves.

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Of course, this is an ideal. In real life, justice in U.S. courts has never been as blind as it should have been. Minorities have been treated worse than majorities. But even more starkly, poor people have been treated much worse than rich people. A public defender is not the same as David Boies. O.J. Simpson had a better defense than your average poor kid from South Central.

We need to fix our justice problem. Those treated unjust deserve better.

And it is not just the judicial branch and/or the Federal justice system. Many laws have been written with the explicit intent to discriminate against the poor (disproportionately, minorities). We need to fix them.

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And to answer one of my earlier questions, being the son of a Holocaust survivor entitles me to my opinion here: No German alive today is guilty of the crimes of World War II. Today’s Germans did not commit these crimes. They are no more guilty or innocent of them as I am myself.

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Or maybe justice in this context means fairness? Ugghh! In this case, it is a terribly chosen moniker. Everyone deserves fair treatment, black, brown, white, or green. And especially the poorer among us.