Jonathan Blanks
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we’re often told. This advice resonates with Jonathan Blanks, and with good reason.
If you walked by Jonathan on the sidewalks of downtown Washington, D.C., he’d strike you as your pretty typical young, educated white guy in a dark suit. Which is to say, he looks like just another think-tanker in the nation’s capital.
But Jonathan’s story is not what you’d expect just by looking at him. Because although Jonathan looks white, his father was black.
“My father told me when I was very young that I may be treated differently because of who I was,” Jonathan recounted. “But he told me to deal with it and move on. As I got older, I realized that I didn’t have to go through anything like what my dad’s generation went through, let alone the generations before him.”
Jonathan grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “My grandparents were born in Mississippi in the late 19th century and were part of the Great Migration that came north during Jim Crow,” Jonathan once recounted for Vox. “But although Fort Wayne was well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, segregation was a fact of life, if not a fact in law, in many Northern cities. Black people were only permitted to live in a small area in Fort Wayne, and that’s where my family went. During the early part of the 20th century, the KKK were a social and political force in Indiana. They would march in town and through the black neighborhood where my father’s family lived. Growing up, I was told about my grandfather standing at the door of the house with his gun drawn, calling the kids home while the Klan marched up the street.”
Jonathan came to appreciate many facets of America’s criminal justice system. His father was a retired 20-year police veteran, who instilled in Jonathan an abiding respect for law enforcement officers. But Jonathan’s upbringing and neighborhood experiences also made him wary of arbitrary authority and abuse.
Jonathan eventually left Fort Wayne to attend Indiana University-Bloomington, where he majored in political science. In 2007, Jonathan joined the Cato Institute, where for 12 years he worked as a researcher in Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies and its Project on Criminal Justice. He has published numerous columns in venues like the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Chicago Tribune, Democracy Journal, and many others.
“When it comes to ‘justice’ in the abstract,” Jonathan says, “it’s very easy to fall into a ‘good guys vs. bad guys’ mentality. But most people who commit crimes aren’t irredeemable villains, and not every cop is an unimpeachable hero. Our current system relies on these oversimplifications, and so it is imperative that we reorient ourselves and our system to deal with life as it is, not as we imagine it to be.”
Jonathan joined FREOPP in 2020. Soon after, the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman thrust Jonathan’s work into the spotlight. In an essay for Democracy, Jonathan writes:
As the continuing protests and demonstrations remind us, police departments have been resisting serious reform for too long. Some departments have made positive changes…But almost all departments have nevertheless maintained the policies that inflict harm on communities — and specifically black communities — while protecting the officers who commit the most egregious acts against the public…There are steps police departments and local governments can take to reorient their actions toward the betterment of the communities they serve. But those steps don’t involve tear gas, riot gear, or rubber bullets.
Today, Jonathan is a Senior Fellow at FREOPP, where he continues his work on policing reform and criminal justice. “I’m excited to explore how criminal justice policy affects the least fortunate in American society, and to be a part of Avik and his team to move public policy forward to those who need it most.”
Jonathan lives in Washington with his wife, Dara Lind.
