Ezra Klein
You often say that “the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.” What do you mean by that?
Bryan Stevenson
The wealth of the colonies was built on genocide of removing Native Americans from lands that they occupied. We kept their names, but we made them leave. We didn’t really acknowledge the injustice of that because we were persuaded that our economic security and our political development require the acquisition of these lands. It began this way of thinking about wealth that is disconnected from the oppression that is sometimes used to create that wealth. And that habit was reinforced through slavery.
We created great wealth in new territories in the south and the colonies by relying on enslaved people and the labor and the benefits that that created without any real thinking about how that wealth was sustained by abuse and oppression and inequality and injustice.
This idea has emerged in America that wealth is created by people with great talent and great ability. We value wealth. We respect wealth. We admire wealth. We disdain the poor. We blame the poor. We fault the poor for not achieving more economic security.
For me, it's important to redefine what it is we are dealing with when we deal with poverty, and that definition begins with recognizing that the opposite of poverty isn't wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. If we actually had been just to those communities that we removed from the land, if we had been just to the formally enslaved, if we'd been just to immigrants who came and gave great wealth, we would actually be in a very different place when it comes to dealing with structural poverty.
Ezra Klein
But the idea of what represents justice is deeply contested. When you ask whether descendants of slave owners owe the communities they enslaved anything, you get a lot of disagreement. And there's huge resistance when the definition of justice would require the bearing of shame, much less reparations or some other kind of recompense.
Bryan Stevenson
There are narratives we have that we rely on to feel comfortable with the status quo. I mean, the people who came to this country as settlers didn't think of themselves as inhumane or barbaric or killers or mass murderers. They just didn't see the native people that they forced off their land as fully human. They said those people were savages. They used that narrative of racial difference to justify their comfort. We used that same narrative of racial difference to justify centuries of enslavement.
I actually think the great evil of American slavery wasn't involuntary servitude and forced labor. The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it. They made up this ideology of white supremacy that cannot be reconciled with our Constitution, that cannot be reconciled with a commitment to fair and just treatment of all people. They made it up so they could feel comfortable while enslaving other people.