We had this same discussion in the other thread: the “drug war” includes both the written laws and their enforcement. The OP didn’t just ask if drug laws were racist, he asked about the laws, the enforcement, and the prosecution.
That’s your claim, yes.
But if we take any facet of the WoD and remove/change it, we can figure out what’s integral to the WoD and what isn’t. If we have something left which is recognizable as the WoD, then that part was tangential, periferal, or coincidental with the WoD, and not part of it.
Take, for instance, the laws. If we legalize drugs, there is no WoD, so the laws are part of it.
Take, for example, enforcement. If there is no enforcement of the drug laws at all then there is no WoD, so enforcing the laws is part of the WoD.
Take, for example, racists getting to enforce the laws. If the laws were not enforced by racists, but the laws still exist and are still enforced, we still have the WoD.
I pointed out the error in your logic in the other thread: the enforcement of our nation’s criminal code, in general, shows bias and discrimination when it comes to LEO’s and the criminal justice system. That does not mean that, for instance, the “war on crime” is racist or that by keeping the same crimes illegal but making sure enforcement and sentencing aren’t prejudicial, that we’ve ended the WoC.
I understand and appreciate this line of reasoning. My question is, what would convince you that a law is itself racist? I think that is the heart of my question. Of course racist humans can enforce a law that disproportionately impacts a certain race. I am wondering if the law itself can be racist.
In my opinion, the war on drugs began with racial underpinnings and has survived to this day through inertia. We project our current mores to the actions of the past in error. Since we live in a era of more racial understanding, we whitewash history by assuming they thought the same way we do now. In reality, the drug war began as a form of de jure racism which has now turned into de facto racism. I claim the passing of time does not alter the fact that the drug war was deliberately racist. The fact that the present system appears to be colorblind (because it does not say explicitly, “blacks are more guilty than whites”, even though it happens in reality) does not obviate the drug war’s sordid racial history.
I think we have an example of a huge number of racist laws in this country. A good example might be “blacks are not allowed to drink from ‘whites only’ water fountains”. The drug laws, however, are totally race neutral.
You even have a point that some (but not all) laws were initially put on the book for racist reasons. But that doesn’t show that continuing to enforce them, even zealously enforcing them is still due to racism.
That I simply do not agree with. The inertia for the WoD is due to people thinking that drugs are bad/horrible/whatever, and not necessarily due to racism. I’d bet money that people who’d say that pot is dangerous and should be illegal wouldn’t then say that it should be legal if your skin is light enough.
Thus far, no one has presented any evidence that the enforcement is being conducted by racists.
That leaves (institutional) racism as a primary component of the War on Drugs.
That’s a little too simple for the distinction between racist and race neutral laws, I think. Take for example voting restrictions in the post-war South. Having literacy requirements combined with grandfather clauses are race neutral to the extent that they set the same standards for people of all races. However, saying you can vote if your grandfather could vote is clearly a racist law if the effect of it is to exclude people because at the time the grandfathers were around, a more directly racist law prevented them from voting based on the color of their skin.
Now, the drug laws obviously aren’t as clear cut as that. However, the disparity in sentencing (not in enforcement, but in the seriousness of the crime as defined by the law) does certainly create a suspicion that the law itself is racist.
It’s obvious on the face of it. Both in this thread and the other one, the discussion was not drug laws. It was the war on drugs. You’re the only one who is defining the war on drugs as only drug laws to the exclusion of other components…
No one has said the problem is that racists are enforcing the laws. We’re talking about systemic racism here, not a suggestion that everyone enforcing the law is a racist.
I agree that it is not proven. Surely, you agree that a politician would not say, “I am a racist. The law I am proposing is a racist law.” Instead, politicians come up with something like the Southern Strategy, where they can appeal to racism without being explicit.
For example, Reagan advisor Lee Atwater said,
The quote above from H.R. Haldeman illustrates this - "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
I think we disagree on the burden of proof. You want a recent smoking gun saying “This is a racist law.” I am content with understanding that the first anti drug laws were racist in nature while looking at the present prison statistics, where blacks are FAR overrepresented. We know from Republicans themselves that they used racially coded language in political discourse because they could not explicitly say “vote against blacks.” In my opinion, the drug war follows the southern strategy, in that it was a way to racially code laws in a way that whites could get behind because of racial antipathy. A cursory look at the Reagan era of conjuring up imagery of black crack welfare queens seems to support this.
I still think it’s a massive burden to overcome. Again, in socieites that are mostly one race it’s the poor underclass who are prosecuted the most for drug crimes. There are a myriad reasons for that as well.
Even in the US, a wealthier white person is more likely to have access to lawyers and money to the extent that they can cut a better deal with the state. Not so much with a poor black person. Also, a black with multiple convictions, whatever they may be, would also be subject to harsher sentencing than a white with few or no convictions.
While there might be an independent racial component like tomndebb’s newspaper article describes, the biggest problem is that drug laws disproportionately affect the poor, and the poor in this country are disproportionately black. The War on Drugs isn’t so much a problem in itself, as it is a symptom of a larger problem.
The war on drugs is the problem, not so much because of its racist component, although I believe there’s overwhelming evidence suggesting the original intent was, and its continued impetus is, racist, notwithstanding tomndebb’s admonition that it’s “not proven”, but because the goal of the war is not to win it anymore, but to ensure its perpetuation for the aggrandizement of those managing it and the largesse realized by the agencies charged with conducting it.
No, it doesn’t. Policies are carried out by people. If the people enforcing a policy treat blacks differently than whites, all other facts being equal, then they are acting as racists.
If, say, Manhattan has 10% of its cops who will stop people for Driving While Black (and perhaps even some black officers who are still stopping people for DWB), then it has an issue where enforcement is being carried out by racists, not where the institution of vehicle safety is institutionally racist.
No, it’s really not, especially since the WoD is, by necessity the laws and their enforcement but not their biased and discriminatory enforcement. Or is the war on crime also racist?
You’re saying the same thing, just tapdancing around the point a bit. You can not have a “system” that just sort of sentences black men more harshly than white men for the same offenses, that takes a judge. You cannot have a “system” that just sort of focuses its drug sweeps on black neighborhoods rather than white ones, that takes LEO’s at the command level. You cannot have a “system” that is more likely to view blacks as potentially criminal and to harass them more often, that takes a police officer.
Blaming improper behavior that evinces racial discrimination and prejudicial behavior (ie. racism) on a “system” rather than the people actually committing the acts just fallaciously reifies an abstraction.
Well, I think you hit on a key part in your post when you talked about the history of the law. The intent of the law is inherently racist. I’d also like to add that now we have a problem in which these convicts are often stripped of their suffrage, not eligible for financial aid for college, and legally discriminated against by public and private employers after serving their prison term in full. Its not clear to me how this can be viewed as anything but racist.
It would be if like Obama started to support the criminalization of benzodiazepenes and anti-depressants (10 Prozac pills gives a minimum sentence of 2 years) as a way to diffuse the tea party movement. Heh. Heh.
- Honesty
I find no particular benefit in arguing intent; there does not seem to be any good way to determine “racist” intent, and advancement of some sort of racist conspiracy doesn’t seem to have much merit.
The practical effect of this stupid stupid drug war–however well-intentioned–is a disproportionate tragedy against an entire generation of young black men, and by extension all who are involved in their lives.
Racist in intent or not, the disastrous consequences are clear, and the notion of making recreational drugs illegal has to go away.
Who said this was personal? That was an example of why the “but weeeeee can’t get away with it” position is logically self defeating.
I’ve never made an official hiring decision in my life. I’ve never bitched that a minority moved next door/nearby. For that matter, in my personal life, white people have given more problems and shit than any minority has.
Hell, most of my immediate family is somewhere between poor white trash and lower middle class. A couple of THEM have been busted big time for selling/using drugs.
You certainly won’t hear me bitching that they got shafted because they got a harsher sentence than some richer, more connected guy. Dumbasses shouldnta been doing it in the first place.
No. The Atwater quote is quite adequate, to me, to demonstrate that some portion of the Reagan administration was still operating on the level of the Southern Strategy, (a point with which I would have agreed, even without that quote). What I would like to see would be something that directly links that attitude to the drug issues that Reagan championed. The Southern Strategy was one of power, in which a white majority in the South was developed into a bloc by appealing to economic fears tied to changes in laws regarding civil rights. Given that Reagan was already in power and that he had that bloc sewn up, where is the connection to his drug policies, (that were hardly the first thing he promoted when he got into office)? Nancy did some anti-drug stuff in 1981 and 1982, but the big anti-drug push did not come until after Reagan’s re-election in 1984. Why employ a specifically racist tactic that late in his term? To what purpose?
Tying Reagan and the Southern Strategy to racism is not that hard. (I doubt that Reagan was much of a serious racist, himself; he had simply led a sufficiently inattentive life that he did not understand why his several racist comments were genuinely racist and counterproductive.) However, tying racism to his drug policy requires some evidence of a connection there.
Ahh! Acting as racists.
This would support my contention that it is institutional racism rather than your earlier assrtion that they were simply racists. Thus, the war on drugs is a racist policy.
Note that when we find the DEA, as a department, pursuing a policy of interdictions in the inner cities while leaving suburban and rural enforcement to the states (where the laws were not as draconian), in order to assert that the people were racist, you need to demonstrate that all the senior officials and officers throughout the entire country, across at least four separate presidential administrations, all just happened to be racists. You need to explain why, (in the Plain Dealer investigation), multiple prosecutors and judges involved who were black were supporting the policies because they were racist.
The more logical explanation would seem to be that society has adopted various attitudes from previous decades so that institutionally racist beliefs pervade many levels of government without requiring that each individual enforcing those laws harbor racist feelings.
And you also have the bigger issue.
Lets say you have legal policy A.
If policy A was created by non racists its A okay, but if it was created by racists its NOT okay? WTF? Thats a pretty goofy way to decide if something is okay or not IMO.
Well, since that is clearly not my position, I’m going to let this observation slide.
Did I SAY that was your position? I was making a point that could arise out the point you were making. If you think there is no connection fine. But, that neither negates your points nor mine.