I think this is important for BLM to acknowledge and take on, and also because it’s a reminder to some in Bloggo world who are in denial regarding the Obama administration and congressional democrats refusal to address and resolve this problem.
I don’t expect a GOP President to take actions to resolve this problem, but I do expect a democratic President to do so. The war on drugs is a gigantic failure; it’s time for our President to admit it. Releasing low level drug “offenders” from prison is a good start, but much more must be done.
While the war on drugs plays a central role in generating conflict between the black community and law enforcement, the critique of institutional racism in policing and the criminal justice system necessarily implicates the nation's drug policies. The grim statistics of racially biased drug law enforcement are well-known: blacks make up about 13% of the population, but 30% of all drug arrests; blacks account for nearly 90% of all federal crack cocaine prosecutions; black federal crack offenders were sentenced to far more prison time that white powder cocaine offenders; blacks and other minorities are disproportionately targeted in traffic stop and stop-and-frisks despite being less likely than whites to be carrying drugs, and so on.
People who have been spent careers working in the drug reform movement didn't need the publication of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow to understand the corrosive and screamingly unfair impact of drug war racism on black communities, but the 2010 broadside helped open eyes outside the movement and deepened the visceral impact of drug war racism for those already in the trenches.
www.alternet.org/...