By Michael Brown

It would be hard to be alive in America right now and not know something about what has happened in Ferguson, Missouri. A young man has been shot and killed. I have had the surrealistic experience of having the same name as this young man, so as I hear hundreds of comments about him, each one reminds me that it could be me.

We can view the death of Michael Brown as an isolated incident but that is not really accurate. His death is part of a pattern, a history, a long struggle for equality. It is true that the merits of this case must be decided on the specific facts, but it is also true that the painful past is contained in this present moment.

If one looks at the data it is nearly impossible to avoid seeing that our criminal justice system does not deliver equal justice. It is not that police, prosecutors and judges are blatantly racist, although some probably are. But that is not the main problem. Racism in our age is not usually blatant; it is subtle, systemic, and often unconscious.

The police officers, prosecutors and judges I know all seem to be good people. They seem to be genuinely concerned about justice. But the system they work for is seriously flawed. African Americans and Latinos get stopped more often, searched more often, arrested more often, convicted more often, and get longer sentences. If you want to check out the numbers, read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. She has done the math.

Much of this unhealthy pattern was established by the drug wars, during which our prison population grew from about 300,000 in the 1980s to over 2,000,000 today. We have the largest percentage of our population incarcerated of any nation in the world. A disproportional number of these prisoners are African American and Latino even though white people use drugs just as much as minorities do. But we don’t see the SWAT teams and tanks in white neighborhoods; that’s not how it works.

The use of military equipment also originates from the drug wars. The federal government gave local police departments this equipment virtually free of charge on the condition that they would join the drug wars. This is how the militarization of the police got started. That is the back story of how the tanks and military force showed up in Ferguson.

It is not hard to see why African Americans would not trust the police or the criminal justice system. Unequal treatment has its consequences. This does not mean that looting is justified or violence is justified, but it helps us understand why rage exists.

Whether we are religious in our world view or not, all of our ethical systems require us to act justly. We need to make sure that all citizens are treated equally. This is not a trivial challenge and we are not very close to achieving it, despite many years of struggle. But that is what is required of us, both by our religious traditions and our secular democratic ideals.

I mourn the death of Michael Brown and pray that his death will be dealt with justly. My hope is that his death may spark a reexamination of racial justice in our society. Sometimes a tragic event can make us see reality more clearly than before. This tragedy is an opportunity for all of us, through our schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, community organizations and governmental bodies to take a hard look at how we administer justice in our country and start to right the wrongs. If we do not alter our path, there will be more tragedies ahead. But if we turn toward justice, life will be safer and more fulfilling for us all.

Michael Brown is the minister at Universalist Unitarian Church of Peoria where he has served since 1991. Social justice and interfaith dialogue are among his areas of particular interest.