"Exclusion of Blacks From Juries Raises Renewed Scrutiny"

"In Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, where Shreveport is the parish seat, a study to be released Monday has found that prosecutors used peremptory challenges three times as often to strike black potential jurors as others during the last decade...

In Georgia, prosecutors excluded every black prospective juror in a death penalty case against a black defendant, which the Supreme Court has agreed to review this fall...

[in another study] No defendants were acquitted when two or fewer of the dozen jurors were black. When there were at least three black jurors, the acquittal rate was 12 percent. With five or more, the rate rose to 19 percent. Defendants in all three groups were overwhelmingly black...

More recently, Justice Stephen G. Breyer has expressed concerns about peremptory challenges, writing in a 2005 concurrence that they seemed “increasingly anomalous in our judicial system.”

He noted that England had eliminated peremptory challenges but “continues to administer fair trials based largely on random jury selection.”"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/politics/exclusion-of-blacks-from-juries-raises-renewed-scrutiny.html?referrer=

There was this really striking moment in the movie Belle (which I strongly recommend seeing, it's gorgeous  and poignant); Belle partially revolves around a legal case on the relative human and economic value of a group of enslaved Africans who were drowned by their traffickers. And there is a moment when the judge who will decide the case is encouraged by a colleague to step aside, because the judge has a half-black niece and his colleague thinks this might limit his objectivity.

Which makes me want to cry because how often was this kind of objection raised and then acted on? And seen as a movement away from bias?

There's such a thing of black-people-can't-be-objective-about-black-people, but our rational friends the whites are totally going to be better at objectivity, let them handle it. They see us, they know.

And it also makes me think about the old "one of my best friends is black", and makes me think about how it isn't "my oldest friend" or "my spouse" (partially because those people know better and carry actual love for the black person in their life, not a delight in their token accessory). Like, would that carry the same social cache or would those relationships be too close so that, sure, this person can theoretically get a pass for that racist joke, but we can't trust their opinion on Ferguson?

FB: this is really important