What ACLU President Deborah Archer had to say about combating racism in speech at Drury

Deborah Archer, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, spoke to attendees at Drury University on advancing racial justice in the nation.

Archer was the first speaker for a series of talks commemorating the university’s 150th anniversary. The event was planned in collaboration with the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship.

The theme of Archer’s talk was “Defending Civil Liberties and Civil Rights in a Divided Nation.” Drury was founded in 1873 on the principle of providing education to everyone regardless of age, sex, race and creed to bridge the great national divide of the time.

“One of the hallmarks of a liberal arts education, such as that championed by Drury University, is its commitment to freedom of speech and religion, as well as equal protection, equal treatment for each and every person,” said Daniel Ponder, a political science professor at Drury and director of the Meador Center for Politics and Citizenship.

Archer is the first person of color to lead the ACLU, and serves as its eighth president. She is also a professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law and faculty director of the law school’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law.

Archer shared memories from her childhood, when her eyes were opened to racism in the country. Her parents are Jamaican immigrants, and she is a first generation American citizen and college graduate.

After moving from their predominantly Black and Latinx community in Hartford, Connecticut to a predominantly white neighborhood, she and her family were made to feel unwelcome by their new community.

“I remember the day when we woke up to find that our house had been vandalized and KKK had been painted on our house,” Archer said. “I was just nine or 10 years old, and my parents had to explain to me who the KKK was and why some of our neighbors didn’t want us here.”

The experience shaped Archer’s childhood, breeding fear that caused her not to attend school for some time and have to live with her grandparents until she could feel comfortable in the house that her parents worked hard to attain. But in time, she overcame those fears, finding instead a desire to combat the racism that plagued her family and other members of marginalized communities.

“I wanted to fight against the racism that required our parents to move from the predominantly black and Latinx community where we felt loved and we felt wanted, to a white neighborhood in order for us to have a quality education,” Archer said.

As she learned more about the history of racism in the country, she saw how deeply ingrained it is into the fabric of our society.

“I think that over the centuries we’ve created a system where wealth, opportunity, education, health and safety are all inequitably distributed and based on race,” Archer said. “Racism in so many ways is America’s operating system.”

She points to examples across the history of our country where advances were made towards equality by changing laws, then immediately negated in some clever way that worked itself around the new policy, including giving Black men the right to vote, then enacting poll taxes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests.

“America makes housing discrimination illegal, and then America responds with redlining and racially exclusionary housing policies, the criminalization of poverty and living while Black,” Archer said. “America makes slavery illegal, and then America responds with mass incarceration, police brutality, and racial jailing.”

One example from recent memory, she said, is the enactment of voter ID laws, both in Missouri and across the country. After a record turnout of voters of color in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, states responded with new voting laws.

“The right to vote is powerful. If the right to vote is the foundation of our democracy, I think you have to acknowledge that that foundation is crumbling,” Archer said. “We have a systematic state-by-state assault on the right to vote.” 

Archer feels that no progress will be made towards equality without looking at the offenses of the past.

“We can’t dismantle racism today, unless you take time to acknowledge and explore those connections, to understand that evolution and adaptation,” Archer said. “You can’t have healthy fruit if you don’t root out the poison in the tree.”

However, she warns against a paradigm that has been adopted by some, which seeks to ignore race entirely in the pursuit of finding equality.

“Ignoring race does not make the reality of racial inequality go away. Race continues to constrain opportunities and life outcomes for some and expand opportunities for others,” Archer said. “Color blindness will only make that worse, will only exacerbate racial injustice and delay the wider world grappling with the way that race shapes access to opportunities.”

She argues that the very people who want to ignore race entirely are those who seek to prop up racial hierarchy by refusing to acknowledge that the system is still based on race.

“For those who want to protect systems of racial hierarchy, it’s important to erase racism from the arena,” Archer said. “If you can argue that Black people have less wealth than white Americans, because they aren’t as smart or industrious, that allows those policies to proceed, and racism goes unchallenged.”

To combat this, Archer says that people must acknowledge the racist reasons behind many of the issues plaguing communities of color, including redlining, less access to capital and other factors that deny wealth to communities of color.

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 While there are no easy answers or solutions to such a deeply ingrained and nuanced societal problem, Archer feels that the ACLU, both at the national and state level, is doing what it can to fight back against pervasive racism.

“The ACLU is built for this, and we’re fighting back against this alarming erosion of democracy in our democratic institutions and our democratic norms,” Archer said.

Many of these efforts are exercised through the legal system. In fact, just this year, the ACLU of Missouri has been fighting against what they feel are exclusionary voter ID laws and efforts to deny women the right to reproductive choice.

Archer points to disparities across the country, and the dichotomy between states that align with causes furthering civil rights and equality and those actively working against them.

“We live in two Americans, and geography increasingly determines whether one receives the full rights of citizenship. The right to vote, the right to make healthcare decisions, and the right to marry who you love could be decided by whether you live in California or Arkansas, in Florida or Illinois,” Archer said. 

She ended by encouraging everyone to join the effort to defend civil rights and civil liberties, in hopes of someday creating a world where those are guaranteed to every person.

“I’m under no illusion that the days ahead in this fight will be easy. The ones that we have had have been incredibly hard, tiring and challenging,” Archer said. “But I have confidence that we can all get to this America, this ideal America, if we work together.”