“Exactly where we are” appears to be some mythical world in which every black neighborhood has continuous crime and no black people are ever imprisoned for first drug offenses.
Oh, wait, is the “committed a crime” how you’re going to weasel out of this? “I said never committed a crime, not never arrested”, is that going to be the tack?
Fundamentally, people are all the same. The labels we ascribe to ourselves, to identify one person against another, are illusions: products of our imagination. Which is not to say they’re unimportant. How many people have died for one country, when they would have died for the other side, but for an accident of birth?
BLM didn’t mourn Tyshawn, because he wasn’t killed by the right type of person. Similarly, they didn’t protest David Kassick’s death, because although he was shot by the right type of person, he wasn’t the right type of person himself.
Maybe it’s human nature: maybe there must be a “them,” in order for there to be an “us”. And we all know how important it is to be included.
Edited to add: I see you’ve been banned. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened to me yet. I expect it will happen soon.
Is it your opinion that if you care about innocent black people getting killed by police, then you must therefore not care about innocent (I assume) white people being killed by police? Because if so, that’s a pretty stupid opinion.
OK. A report assessing the overall harm caused by the drugs, (with alcohol far ahead of each), that includes in its assessment the harm from imprisonment and other related issues. Contrast that the to the actual medical assessments of the drugs themselves that make no such claim. Then a government report explaining why it considers the need to more harshly criminalize one drug over the other, thus perpetuating the funding to support existing programs. Again, contrasted against the actual medical examinations provided by subsequent posters.
The laws were not initially passed for racist reasons. However, once the hysteria of the first couple of years passed and more sober assessments showed that crack was not instantly addicting, the laws were left in place for nearly twenty years while evidence mounted that they were unfair. That is institutional racism.
And even if some discrepancies in harm can be demonstrated, that would not justify the fact that law enforcement more heavily targets black communities when white use of powder is actually higher than black use of crack.
