[tumblr_photoset id=932 /]

There is an interesting part in Hicky’s trials where the Chief Justice, Elijah Impey, says to the jury in his closing remarks, “Hicky is a man among the dregs of the people. He keeps sepoys at his house.”

I have a couple problems with this:

1. These are the last words a jury is going to hear before deciding guilty or not guilty. It doesn’t sound very impartial for a Chief Justice to be calling a defendant human backwash.
2. Apparently renting out your house to dirty, smelly, scary Indians makes you a worthless human being.

This is not unusual for 18th century British India. But, imagine if a prosecutor could say today that you shouldn’t trust a defendant because they are Pakistani-American, and you just don’t know what him or his “people” could do, and the jury would believe that.

In Sarah Koenig’s podcast, Serial, about the conviction of 17 year old Adnan Sayed for murder, the prosecutor said that Adnan killed his ex-girlfriend because of his culture. “He became enraged. He felt betrayed that his honor had been besmirched. And he became very angry and he set out to kill Hae.”

This argument was backed up by a report the police commissioned from an “expert” consultant group on Islamic Thought: “It is acceptable for a Muslim man to control the actions of a woman by completely eliminating her,” read the report. “Within this harsh culture, he has not violated any code — he has defended his honor.”

The jurors said that Adnan’s religion did not affect their decision. But their statements indicated otherwise. “I’m not sure [about] the cultures over there, how they treat their women. He just wanted control and she wouldn’t give it to him,” one juror said. Another said that when the jurors were deliberating one was saying, “They were trying to talk about his culture, and Arabic culture. Men rule, not women.” (Serial, Episode 10, Around Minutes 8 – 12)

That’s just blatant racism. Also, Adnan was born and raised in Maryland.

The more involved my reading becomes, the more I see modern parallels of institutionalized racism, and how unfair nearly everything happened to be for you if you happened to be poor. You didn’t stand a chance (you still don’t really stand much chance) and no one except the disenfranchised seemed to realize this.