Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos: How This Black Man Almost Went To Jail.

“I got a letter from the government
The other day
I opened and read it
It said they were suckers” — Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos by Public Enemy.

50 percent of black men have been arrested. This is an appalling stat if you contemplate it. It is deplorable that we allow this to continue. Our failure to examine why this occurs strikes at the soul of our nation. Allow me to submit to you that we do not ignore this stat, but we embrace it because it feeds into the myth that we have told ourselves: that black people did better with slavery. 50 percent of black men arrested is not a flaw in the system, it is by design.

I too was almost arrested when I was 39 years old. My infraction? I believed that same-sex couples, in the state of Arizona, had the same privacy right that my wife and I enjoy in our medical records. The Honorable Bradly Soos disagreed with me and forced me to defy his flawed order to make my client testify about the contents of his personal private counseling records. This was before marriage equality was the law of the land. This was when Republicans ran on amending the Constitution to deny same-sex couples the right to marry and Democrats' virtue signaled that they believe in the traditional definition of marriage. It was the time when gays and lesbians yearned to marry the person they loved and desperately wanted someone to fight for them and…