Justice: “White Man’s Paperwork”
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image: A representation of the Justice tarot card. A black person with brown skin wearing a blue suit. They have their short locs up in a high ponytail and a beard. They’re sitting behind a desk with a statue of lady justice and a gavel resting on it by three leatherbound books.
I have no empathy for those who grease the wheels of the powerful. Still, this week's trials of Fani Willis and Alejandro Mayorkas can teach us some things about America. Specifically how the sham trials and everyday procedurals correspond to tarot's Justice card.
American leaders presume to rule by divine right. This is another unbroken link they have to their European lineage—whatever their actual race may be. This is why they swear on the Christian Bible. This is why our money says "In God We Trust."
The motto "out of many, one" doesn't so much indicate that we are a cohesive people.
Rather it reminds us that out of all the laws around the world, we will all be ruled by this one, oppressive set. That out of all the Gods in the world, one has been chosen, and the rest of us are expected to submit to him without issue.
Alejandro Mayorkas and Fani Wallis find themselves before the court for being the wrong color or culture in too high a place.
The role of the court in these cases, and tarot's Justice is to enforce not law of the land, but the customs of communities that matter.
No one actually believes tarot's Justice card means real justice.
A better term for Justice is "paperwork." It talks about everything official, everything documented, every document that can eventually be used to trap you or free you.
The traveling passes slavers gave those they enslaved are reflected in this card. Marriage licenses, deeds, leases, and wills all fall under its auspices.
When I was a kid, when my mother would talk about marriage, even just in a general way, her boyfriend would bark "white man's paperwork."
To him, such formality were trivial, artificial. What mattered was love and family. But Black love and black family means little in the face of white supremacy. Rarely, but sometimes, white man's paperwork is all that stands between you and losing both.
Justice does not depict the goddess Justitia. Justitia wears a blindfold to show her impartiality. The figure on tarot's Justice card is the titan goddess Themis.
Themis was the prophetic dispenser of divine law, and presided over the oracle of Delphi.
An early wife of Zeus, she was often the one to let him know how divine order and fate actually worked. After all, the Titans preceded the gods. She intended to help Zeus become a good governor of human life and destiny.
Jutitia is the Roman version of Themis' daughter, Dike.
Dike is associated with the execution of sentences and trials, as well as deciding when people will die. In this Roman form Dike, and Justitia is more a concept than a diety.
She indicates impartiality before the laws and customs of society. She's there to ensure the law is evenly applied.
Where does it start to break down. Well, Themis is also associated with customs. She encourages conformity and piety. She was a goddess of people getting together...like juries.
She also presided over gender and gender roles, making her a precursor of the current fights about trans rights in the court.
I'll be teaching this month's workshop in Tarot In Community on places we find the people's justice in the cards.
That's on Thursday, so if you join before Thursday at 7pm ET, you'll be able to access the link!
(Don't worry if you can't make it. The recording goes up within a few days of the initial workshop!)
Themis’ role is intended to be divine. That's why they require no blindfold.
God may display favor, but God doesn't discriminate between their subjects. Thus, the thinking goes, neither would Themis.
But under white supremacy, the paperwork, the rules, and the legal theories of Christianity all convene under this card.
This is what rightfully makes Justice the opposite of the equity and social justice most of us crave. The white man's word is conflated with the word of God. On paper, they are monotheistic. In practice, they worship themselves and money.
The trinity of white supremacy holds white man up as the Father, the Bible as the Son, and the spectral nature of money as The Holy Ghost.
What justice can we reach in the face of all that?
When I think about tarot's Justice card, I think of people who bought their own children out of enslavement.
I think of Sojourner Truth suing her New York slave master for selling her child to Alabama. She won.
Enslavement, after all, was a legal institution. Slave law as it was called was big business.
There are times when an appeal to the law is the only power you have in the situation.
The enslaved Africans apprehended on The Amistad understood this. They needed an opportunity to speak to the people with the power to free them or keep them in chains. They had exhausted all other options. They knew what little they had left.
But the law is designed to work against those who aren't deified in this country.
As a Hairston, my family's particular slavers were often encouraged to go to college to study slave law so they could be better slavers.
Enslavement and its legal bolsters are why we have the electoral college, why foraging is criminalized, college is expensive.
White folks will deny themselves help and pleasure happily, so long as they know a Black person will be denied that pleasure tenfold.
That's the other working of Justice. The balancing of divine scales. The settling of scores. The paying of debts.
Reparations for enslavement, the practical administration of them should they be delivered, would be the work of this card. So would any approach to abolition and manumission that went through the court.
The Emancipation Proclamation is a good example of what I mean when I say Justice is a representation of white man's paperwork.
Justice, as tarot presents it on the Justice card, is at once necessary and evil. It will never be where real social justice or equity lives. The best it can do is keep the customs of the land going.
It's not there to deviate, alleviate, or rock the boat. It's there to keep the ship upright and sailing. It's there to further muddy the line between divine law and the work of nation building.
Like Americans, ancient Greeks believed that their nation was divinely inspired. The Gods lived in the soil and had affinities, even liaisons, with humans. This troubled the line between human and divine.
American sees itself as more Roman than Greek. Notably, the Eagle was a symbol of Roman military might. We find the eagle on the Emperor card as drawn by Patricia Coleman Smith. Its that power that defines America.
In Ancient Greece, the Eagle was a form Zeus was known to assume. Zeus, the husband of Themis. Zeus, who needed the the guidance of Themis.
And so it is still, as we watch the former president be indicted again and again. The power of the leader against the power of the court. This is not the usual order, as the court was designed to advise and strengthen the Emperor. We'll see where it goes.
We're living in times where we are at the mercy of the merciless court. We are living in times where law means nothing to oppressed and oppressor alike.
Justice shows us the caprice of the law when it comes to needs of the most marginalized. It reminds us it can make someone who clawed or lucked their way up marginalized once more.
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
