STEVE GOLDSTEIN: As the country grapples publicly with persistent racial injustices, individual reckonings may be happening in more personal and private spaces. Retired Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Colleen McNally wrote about her own realization that she grew up racist and reflected on what she could do to fix an unequal system. In a recent commentary for The Arizona Republic, she writes, "I'm trying to stop being defensive. I'm trying to figure out what I can do to fix a system that I unwittingly benefited from at the expense of others." I spoke with Judge McNally recently about this new understanding of her past and our collective present, and began by asking whether recent events had sparked her to think about race, or if she'd been thinking about it for a long time.
COLLEEN MCNALLY: I've been thinking about these issues for a long time, but I really hadn't felt compelled to communicate about my own thoughts or my own experience until the last few weeks when it really felt that there was an urgency in our whole country to do better than we've been doing. And I started by a Facebook page, which felt much safer than sending something to the guest column at the Arizona Republic. And I really hesitated. In fact, I was afraid to have anybody read it at first because I thought I'd lose my courage to post it, because I was concerned about how people would react to what I was saying. There's some shame involved in what I was saying.
GOLDSTEIN: There's this juxtaposition. People talk about the word 'anti-racist' as opposed to actually someone who is involved in racism, as far as just living their lives and, and whether it's white privilege or whatever we want to label it. So was it one that sort of hit you between the eyes in a sense, that you could have been doing more and you just weren't doing it, as opposed to actually actively being someone who was trying to oppress others?
MCNALLY: Yeah, I certainly didn't ever see myself, and still don't see myself, as someone who is trying to oppress others. It was really getting the, getting hit in the face, as you said, by it. That by not doing more, by not really being actively against things that were going on, that I was a part of it. And that's hard to swallow when that's not what you meant to be. That's not who you meant to be. And I think once you get that in front of your, part of yourself, that wow, you're not acting in alignment with your values, if you don't push hard back against a system we inherited — not a system, perhaps, we created — you're not an anti-racist. And that's what I want to be. I want to be somebody that's stepping up against it.
GOLDSTEIN: From a professional standpoint, you're a retired judge. And certainly we know what the judicial system generally, certainly more people of color who are incarcerated. What about in the system? Did you personally encounter other judges or other people in the system you perceived as actually being consciously biased? Did you feel like there was a circumstance that maybe they were in the same situation you were, that they just really didn't, maybe didn't think about in an active way?
MCNALLY: You know in the judicial system, our highest value really is equal justice under the law. And I don't remember ever a circumstance where one of my colleagues, one of the other judges or even people who worked at the court, said or did anything that I thought was actively oppressive or unfair or racist. But that's not where the inquiry ends. What I feel like I've finally understood — and this is the shame part for me, too, it's like, "Why did it take so long to get this?" — is that if you look at the system broadly, you look at the data of what's happening, it's not fair. If you look at how many kids go into child protective custody from black and brown communities, it's not fair. How many people are in prison, how many people are prosecuted, how many people get given the good ends of things? It's not fair. It's not proportionate to our community. And I think that is what lets us know that we have built systems that don't require racists to run them to be racist. Good people can run these systems and they have racist outcomes. That's the hard part to swallow when you've devoted your life to a system. And then you see that there's this huge flaw that goes against the highest value that you have, which is fairness and equal justice.
GOLDSTEIN: Have you been able to push back, have you been able to start programs or encourage others to do things within the legal system to try to make some of this more fair, especially when it comes to race?
MCNALLY: In the last seven years of my career as a judge, I was in the juvenile system where we had the huge influx of child welfare cases and really a diminishing number of juvenile justice or kids involved in criminal actions. That reduced as the child welfare cases went up. But despite what happened, whether the numbers went up or went down, the disproportionate contact remained. So the first step really is to face that — is to look at the data. And I feel like we did a lot of work to do that. We have committees both in the justice side — juvenile justice side or delinquency side — and also in child welfare. But you can just churn the data and churn the data and not do anything about it. And I feel like that's often where we got stuck, which I'm not saying we didn't try. But as the gentleman I referenced in the article pointed out to me, if you're not acting urgently to fix this, it must not be as important to you as you say it is. And so that's where I think we could do better is that we really need to use that information to drill down to why it's happening and to change those systems so that it's fair.
GOLDSTEIN: Do you feel like it is something that we're going to see a shift? Is this something that is a tipping point for someone who may be not sure what to do about it, but they want to do something?
MCNALLY: There've been times where there's been energy and focus and then things sort of fizzled out. And I certainly share people whose concerns that are afraid that's really what's going to happen. But, you know, throughout our whole history, there's also moments in time that do change everything, you know? I think it happened in the '60s during the civil rights movement, where there was really a broader understanding of what was happening and a big shift. Of course, I was raised to think, "Oh, that's all that needed to happen. It happened." And now it's so clear how wrong that thinking was. And so, I don't know. I'm hopeful. I am kind of optimistic by nature, but as I was saying, there's been such a diverse group of people who are speaking up — people that I never would have imagined want to talk about this and say, "What else can I do? What do you think I should read?" And I've got people telling me, "You know what, also you should read." And I love that. I love that there's this, it seems like it's a hunger for a conversation about how we can be better. How can we can be the country that we thought we were and we know we should be.
GOLDSTEIN: That is retired Judge Colleen McNally. We've been talking about the column she wrote for the Arizona Republic recently about growing up racist and trying to change that perspective as she's gotten older. Judge McNally, thanks so much for the conversation.
MCNALLY: Thank you so much, Steve.
