Portraits of Justice #14: Carter Habeeb {Birmingham, USA}

Welcome to week #14 with Portraits of Justice!

 We've been around the world a time or two in the last months, and are doubling back to the USA for another look. The USA is a large country with many stories that look very different depending on your location, birth place, and the colour of your skin. In a genuine effort to understand many diverse perspectives, I thought it pertinent to hear a voice from the different experiences. 

Carter is a student and comes from Birmingham, Alabama, in the south of the USA
(Read a story from the northern states {Louis, Chicago}, CLICK HERE).

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"My name is Carter Habeeb.  From my point of view, in the United States, justice is when we follow all the rules set in place and we achieve an end result that is based on precedent, on things that happened in the past. And its not necessarily what's right, but what the structure allows for."

"Put simply, ideal justice would be...what is right happening! Those have done wrong being held accountable for their actions, and those who have had wrong done to them are able to find peace and are able to reconcile what has happened to them. But again, that is not always the case, especially recently in America."

To take it a step further, what would it like to pursue the 'right kind of justice'?

"Its a hard for me to envision because in my life time I've not seen it. What I suppose it would look like is the voiceless, the people without a voice, they start being heard. The majority might start speaking up for those who not being heard at all, because a lot of the time the marginalized are those who are taken advantage of by the systems that are in place."

"One of the biggest roles in my local context is to do simple things like run food drives or hand out clothes during the winter, or raise money for local communities. Very local work. In my context, as duty of christians, is to help out our brothers and sisters. One of the best ways to do this is through programs like “Feed the Homeless”, help them get job skills, or help young people get an education – just a lot of programs on the ground. Very practical stuff."

"Something that comes to mind that I feel is really beautiful is that on July 4^th, Independence day in the United States, a lot of people will come together from different backgrounds and different traditions and different ancestries. They all come together and unite in the fact that they have goal for the future: that goal being to be free from oppression and to live in a world where we can see justice even though we are so far away from it. It's a day where we celebrate being free from oppression in the hope that we can get even further away from oppression, even though there are always forces in society that are pushing down on us and trying to silence our voices. It's a very hopeful day, we all celebrate how fortunate we are, and how much work there is left to be done to make the world, and our context, more righteous and more just.

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