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Safety, Friendship, and Dreams,
Bell, Monica
Bell, Monica
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Abstract
In this Essay, I argue that the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement is observable through state failure to respect and protect three intertwined social entitlements-safety, friendship, and dreams-in many high-poverty African-American communities. One might envision these entitlements as part of a bundle of rights and privileges that constitute full membership in the American community. American government, at the national, state, and local levels, has routinely fallen short of its obligations to
equitably safeguard these aspects of American life and has bungled most attempts to change course. The Essay also discusses the challenges of viscerally understanding the depths of these failures and the need for new conceptions of legal and social change to recognize and respond to them. To build these arguments, I weave together narratives based on interview research, sociological theory, and analysis of case law.
I am not a poet. The words that open this Essay are drawn from interviews with Khalila Thomas and Fayard St. Jean, who in July 2015 were both eighteen-year-olds living in West Baltimore. With the exception of punctuation, free-verse arrangement, and editing for succinctness, I have left their words unadulterated.' This unconventional technique for displaying qualitative data reflects my belief that, in order to complete the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement, lawyers and activists must stretch their
limbs toward the unorthodox, the unthinkable.
I use empirical poetry as a metaphor for the type of bold reexamination of the state and communities' relationships to it that will be necessary to end marginalization through the racially inequitable organization of geographic space. We must move from efforts to merely soften the "ghetto"' toward what philosopher Tommie Shelby calls "ghetto abolition"-or "an aggressive attempt at fundamental reform of the basic structure of our society."I To abolish the "ghetto," we might need to violate some tenets of traditional legal analysis, and we must explore new audiences for legal scholarship. Thus, this Essay is not necessarily directed toward lawmakers, adjudicators, or regulators. Instead, it is written in conversation with movements for racial and economic justice, aiming to highlight nontraditional law-infused frameworks for change.