Lit Mags
Do You Have the Right to Justice? Take This Quiz
"Miranda," an interactive flow chart by Tara Campbell
Do You Have the Right to Justice? Take This Quiz
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Miranda
Author's note: Reader, I was tired. So tired of seeing the same patterns play out with people of color in the justice system, over and over; and so tired of railing against it in the same way, over and over again. I find that when I'm no longer able to respond in words, I turn to forms. Constraints. I'd read Isle McElroy's piece in Diagram "The Death of Your Son: A Flowchart" months before, and had been wanting to try that format, but hadn't been able to think of something that wouldn't feel gimmicky. Well, turns out that 1) anger is a motivator, and 2) a problem of patterns and constraints found its match in a format consisting of patterns and constraints. I originally wrote this piece as a static decision tree (see here). I was thrilled to see how Electric Lit turned it into a dynamic, interactive hybrid poetic piece. The final format just underscores the notion that although each individual in a system thinks they're making their own choices, they're only seeing a fraction of the whole, and the eventual outcomes won't change until the underlying structures change.
