My community is struggling with an event that is emblematic of a serious problem in our country: the institutionalized targeting of African American men in the so-called "War on Drugs." A young Black man was shot by a white police officer while resisting arrest in a narcotics investigation. Many people in our downtown community came out to protest and question the circumstances of the shooting, but others feel the officer should be supported for doing his duty.
White America has been taught by the media, law enforcement and government not to think too carefully about a story like this. The person was "just a felon", after all. A new book, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, explores the development of an intentional structure that disenfranchises African Americans to the same or greater extent that Jim Crow did in the last century.
How many communities across the country regularly include stories about drug busts featuring African American men in their local newspapers? Studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites yet our media has convinced us that drugs are a majority Black enterprise. There are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870. Michelle Alexander argues that this is not by accident but by design.
Alexander, a legal scholar, was interviewed on Democracy Now yesterday.
The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.
The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.
The recent shooting death in my community has provoked a strong reaction from residents. Over 300 people came out to question the Mayor, the DA and the Police Chief about details of the arrest and shooting. Community leaders are aware of the racial politics of the "War on Drugs" and are demanding answers.
Like during the civil right movement of the 50s and 60s, this incarnation of racist public policy must be opposed vigorously – not just by African American leaders, but by white allies. This new book will help us crystallize arguments and support them with documented facts and statistics as we seek to educate more people. Racist practices in the criminal justice system are just as abhorrent as the legal apartheid of the Jim Crow era and must not stand.