Guilty

As the mayor of Saint Paul said earlier:

“At some point, this trial also becomes a trial of our criminal justice system, a trial of our court system. A trial to determine if this legal system that delivered us separate but equal, that has delivered us so many horrific decisions throughout the course of history, if this system is capable yet of valuing Black and Brown lives.”

Mayor Melvin Carter, Saint Paul

And yet, a guilty verdict isn’t justice. It is the bare minimum of what we should expect from a functioning judicial system. The word “valuing” in the context of Mayor Carter’s quote is a binary — valued at all, or not…

We hope that the conversation around the treatment of non-white individuals — specifically Black people, even more specifically, Black people who use drugs — remains front-and-center in our collective discussions of race and equity in our communities and within healthcare.