Growing up in America, I studied the caste system in India and its strict stratification that predetermined one’s access to almost any endeavor that led to wealth, power, or privilege. What I did not study was the caste system that exists in the United States. (For a discussion of this American phenomena see Here). The absence of social mobility is powerfully underwritten by those seeking to maintain the status quo. For them, any tool is fair game: defunding public education, opposing a living wage, suppressing voter participation, demanding immigrant deportation, stoking xenophobia and Islamophobia, denying a path to citizenship, marginalizing the poor. But perhaps the most powerful trump card that can be employed to establish control over a people’s movements and destiny is mass incarceration.
With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the decade of the 1960’s was a time of remarkable social legislative progress. However, one of the great ironies to come out of that era of nonviolent civil disobedience was how the conservative political establishment spun the optics of civil disobedience to the white populace. The Civil Rights demonstrations resulted in the arrests of thousands of protesters. On the nightly news, white America routinely saw black demonstrators being taken to jail for “breaking the law”. Quickly, the Southern governors took up the call for “Law and Order” as a tool to blunt the effectiveness of civil disobedience. Nixon decried “the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to obey them.” (Richard Nixon, If Mob Rule takes Hold in US, US News and World Report, 8/15/66, p. 64.) Not only did conservatives identify civil disobedience as a leading cause of crime, they also decried the riots that followed the death of Dr. Martin Luther King as further proof of the breakdown of Law and Order. Law and Order rhetoric became a central plank in Nixon and Reagan’s “Southern Strategy”. Reagan then conflated a “crime epidemic” with drug use in his infamous declaration of a “War on Drugs.”
One of the results of the War on Drugs policy initiatives was to fund the militarization of America’s police forces and defund programs aimed at drug treatment and education. Reagan and the conservative Congress pushed passage of mandatory minimum drug sentences - especially for crack cocaine, and instituted laws that denied public housing and student loans to anyone convicted of a drug offense. Bill Clinton went even further to win the white swing vote. He was determined that the Republicans would not “out tough” him on anti-crime initiatives. He saw this hard line stance as his path to secure the rural white vote. He signed legislation that permanently banned eligibility for welfare and food stamps for felony drug offenders. As Michelle Alexander points out in her book, The New Jim Crow, “During Clinton’s tenure, Washington slashed funding for public housing by 17 Billion (a reduction of 61%) and boosted corrections by 19 Billion (an increase of 171%), effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor”(page 57). In effect, by the beginning of the 21st century, the conservative strategies of “law and order” and the “war on drugs” had succeeded in duplicating the effects of Jim Crow, thereby hardening the strictures of the caste system in America.
But perhaps the greatest attack on the poor came through the policing decisions to target black neighborhoods to conduct the War on Drugs. According to the 1999 US Department of Health “National Household Survey on Drug Abuse”, white teenagers were more likely to have sold drugs than black teenagers. But, in the years these studies were conducted, the incarceration rate of Black men was 13 times higher than White men. Clearly, since drug use was pervasive across all American demographics, anywhere the police chose to look is where they would find drugs and drug use. Did the police choose to stake out the white suburbs and gated communities, the elite colleges or “country club” watering holes of the middle and upper classes? Of course not. Nightly coverage of police seizing X-boxes, flat screen TV’s, and cash from fraternity houses or raiding soccer moms’ minivans as a result of “anonymous tips” would have had middle class America up in arms about a “police state”.
Since the end of WWII, drug use and addiction in the US had been viewed as a public health concern, addressed by treatment and counseling; however, between 1980 and 2000, the politics of mass incarceration shifted the focus to punishment and imprisonment. Those convicted of felonies faced denial of public assistance and housing, denial of access to education stipends, imposition of mandatory sentencing, disenfranchisement, denial of the right to serve on a jury or in governmental office, and destruction of the family unit (returning parolees could not live in public housing, and without housing, people can lose custody of their children). While all this political framing and manipulation helped secure the conservative white vote, it also solidified the use of fear, race, and objectification to control the black and brown communities. By 2007, more than 7 million people (1 in every 31 US citizens) were either in jail, on probation, or on parole according to a study by the Pew Center on the State.
How and why did we as a society wander so far off the path of sensibility and reason? How did Human Rights and Civil Rights get sacrificed on the pyre of racism, retribution, police militarism, and for-profit incarceration? Part of the answer seems to be the disturbing and chilling “need” in America to maintain a caste system that allows citizens to console themselves that there is always someone in worse shape than they are - there are always those who can be racked and stacked below one’s level on the pecking order, irrespective of the suffering this subjugation entails. Another part of the answer lies in the cynical manipulation of the fears of poor and working class Whites in order to maintain political advantage by the conservative status quo.
The politics of race and class in this election cycle continue apace. As usual, the “Law and Order” theme is a major component in conservative stump speeches. Stop and Frisk has been resurrected as a viable tool of control and intimidation even though it was found to be unconstitutional by a federal court in 2013. Coded rhetoric and racial fearmongering are the coin of the day. Efforts to target minority voting with “surgical precision” have been legislated in major battleground swing states (see North Carolina voter id legislation). These policies and tactics are cynical, intentional manipulations of public perception, deployed to secure a type of governance that runs counter to American principles of Equality, Freedom, and Justice. At best, these conservative political merchants of hatred and divisiveness are on the wrong side of history; at worst, they lead us down a long, dark, and discordant path of societal subjugation, control, and demonization.
During this voting season, bend your energies to helping America get onto the correct footing. Work to bring about the cultural, legislative, financial, and social changes that will dismantle America’s caste system. We will never make progress if we choose not to care, not to be involved. Stay woke! Forward Together.