<html>
<body>
<h1><font size=4><b>The New Jim Crow <br>
</b></font></h1><h2><b>How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent
American Undercaste </b></h2><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/MichelleAlexander">
Michelle Alexander</a><br><br>
</font><font size=1>
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175215/tomgram:_michelle_alexander,_the_age_of_obama_as_a_racial_nightmare/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175215/tomgram%3A_michelle_alexander%2C_the_age_of_obama_as_a_racial_nightmare/<br>
<br>
<br>
</a></font><font size=3>Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and
took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th
president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been
celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's
election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the
bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America. <br><br>
Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that
"the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of
equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in
his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this
is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or
relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust
us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can
get to the promised land.<br><br>
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be
counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in
America.<br><br>
Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them
angry. In the "era of colorblindness" there's a nearly
fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have
"moved beyond" race. Here are a few facts that run
counter to that triumphant racial narrative:<br><br>
*There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in
prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a
decade before the Civil War began.<br><br>
*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon
disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment
was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on
the basis of race.<br><br>
* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration
of the African American family is due in large part to the mass
imprisonment of black fathers.<br><br>
*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American
men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the
Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing
undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a
second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote,
automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in
employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as
their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow
era.<br><br>
<b>Excuses for the Lockdown<br><br>
</b>There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime
rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to
more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of
rampant crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown
men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent,
second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.
<br><br>
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the
sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the
past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few
decades -- they are currently at historical lows -- but imprisonment
rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the
vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug
offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the
federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the
state prison population.<br><br>
The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks,
bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but
those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation
wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor
communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people
of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar
rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are
significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black
youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more
severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for
example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the
emergency room as their African American counterparts.<br><br>
That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's
prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug
offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of
all drug offenders sent to prison.<br><br>
This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that
black men have higher rates of violent crime. <i>That's</i> why the
drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class
suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins
and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It
has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent crime.<br><br>
Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the
current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not
rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime
and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was
part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using
racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to
attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and
threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In
the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House Chief
of Staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key
is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing
to."<br><br>
A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the
streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized
on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible
for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and
drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse
and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug
war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of
dollars in additional funding to it. <br><br>
The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug
dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would
saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures
nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass
harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes -- sentences longer
than murderers receive in many countries. <br><br>
Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be
even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill
Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say
I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's
"tough on crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in
federal and state prison inmates of any president in American
history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison
populations. He and the "New Democrats" championed
legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor
the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food
stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of
political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you've
been labeled a felon. <br><br>
<b>Facing Facts<br><br>
</b>But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't
the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the violent
offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV
movies. In real life, the answer is no. <br><br>
The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or
violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that
increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most
successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this
war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse,
federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement
agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes
seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct
monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.<br><br>
The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse
for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out
of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for
sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or
even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s --
the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80%
of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug
generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as
prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.
<br><br>
In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly
short period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people
of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the
very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some
cases, died for.<br><br>
Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial
reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and
become CEOs or corporate lawyers -- not to mention president of the
United States -- causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've
come. <br><br>
Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth.
In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were
when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner
cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live
below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in
1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it
was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in
Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!<br><br>
When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our
"colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see
a familiar social, political, and economic structure -- the structure of
racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found
at the prison gate.<br><br>
This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. This is not the
promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a
recurring racial nightmare.<br><br>
<br>
<i>Michelle Alexander is the author of
</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581030/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness</a><i> (The New Press, 2010). The former director of
the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also
served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme
Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan
Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of
Law at Ohio State University. To listen to a TomCast audio
interview in which Alexander explains how she came to realize that this
country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click
<a href="http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-jim-crow.html">
here</a>.<br><br>
<br><br>
</i></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>