I’m looking at last Tuesday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “State leads in prison drug gap,” says the headline. The subhead explains, “Blacks get drug terms 42 times the rate of whites, studies say.” The front page story replete with data and charts and graphs continues on page nine with the headline, “Studies show bias in drug arrests.”
I’ve looked around. I don’t see any follow-up this week in any of the Wisconsin dailies. I’m sure there were a flurry of local broadcast news stories that rode on the Journal-Sentinel story that day, but that’s it. News-cycle over. The so-called “news-cycle” is a joke. People kowtow to the media, warp events to assure maximum exposure on the late news, because — well –if the story doesn’t run the day it all happens, then it isn’t news, is it?
“What you reading?” I asked.
“The Catcher in the Rye,” she said, a little frown at the corner of her lips.
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s okay. I mean it’s good. But I just think about a little black child or Mexican kid readin’ this in school. They look at Holden Caulfield’s life an’ think, Damn, this kid got it good. What’s he so upset about?”
I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “So much we know that they never think about, and so much they think about without a thought about us.”
I didn’t have to tell Gara who they and us were. We lived in a they-and-us world while they lived, to all appearances, alone.
– Walter Mosley, Blonde Faith
Where does this story of the American gulags start? It’s correct but facile to trace its roots to 17th century slavery in North America. The white flight to the suburbs in the fifties simply underscored the white bigotry and racism that emerged after the civil war to continue to dominate those who had been enslaved. If black people were moving in, then white people had to move out. It was about property values they said, as they smiled pleasantly, and withdrew from onerous contact with the black pariahs.
In the sixties white people started to feel confused. The feelings of entitlement hadn’t gone away, but the insularity, the sense of being simply “us” in a world where black people were invisible was challenged by federal law, and by an assertiveness welling up in the black community, an assertiveness that was on one hand principled, powerful, and orderly, and on the other hand riotous, chaotic and frightening. The Watts riots in 1965, the riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the emerging strength of the civil rights and black power movements, growing from the work for integration and fair wages in the fifties to radical community support efforts in the seventies — all heightened white Americans’ awareness of the disparities and discrimination limiting opportunities for black Americans to find equality of treatment and opportunity anywhere in America. And that growing white awareness included an unhealthy element of fear.
The population density and ghettoized conditions of black people living in urban neighborhoods in many if not most American cities, and the structural unemployment of black workers that ran at about double the rate for white workers fed a growing culture of alienation among the poor.
I think it’s interesting that one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the dynamics that drive these conditions is essentially forbidden by the strong taboo in American culture against any analysis that smacks of “Marxism.” The obvious class distinctions that cut across color lines, the impoverished people — white or black — share common needs and live in similar circumstances. A working class of people who are doing their best to provide for their families and are fortunate enough to have stable employment, exists and it is comprised of blacks and whites. A middle class of salaried people, professionals, and business owners has higher income and more opportunities than the working class that has more limited choices and lower incomes. Wealth itself is color blind, although wealthy people obviously are not. Regardless, an upper class of wealthy people has characteristics, needs, and influence unrelated to color but highly correlated to the opening opportunities of education and association that comes with wealth.
To even begin to discuss the disparities in justice administration revealed in the reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel cited last Tuesday, we’ll have to agree that the people concerned, the inmates and the enforcers, are bound by prejudices and class distinctions, driven by attitudes of fear and alienation, and sorely in need of help everywhere in “the system.”
Here are a couple of links that I’ll try to write about soon…
The Sentencing Project… some findings:
- Since the inception of the “war on drugs” in 1980, there have been more
than 31 million arrests for drug offenses in the United States.
- In the nation’s largest cities, drug arrests for African Americans rose at three
times the rate for whites from 1980 to 2003, 225% compared to 70%. This
disparity is not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug use.
- In 11 cities, black drug arrests rose by more than 500% from 1980 to 2003.
- The extreme variation in city-level drug arrests suggests that policy and
practice decisions, and not overall rates of drug use, are responsible for much
of this disparity.
Human Rights Watch — Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States
The racial disparities in incarceration generated by drug control strategies raise deeply troubling questions. Why are white drug users and sellers comparatively free of arrest and incarceration for their illegal activity? Why has the United States continued to address illicit drugs primarily with a punitive criminal justice approach, including harsh prison sentences? Why has the country been willing to impose the burden of incarceration for drug offenses primarily on those who by virtue of race and poverty are already among the most marginalized in society and the most politically powerless?
