Post by Cynthia L. Benjamin on Oct 15, 2016 3:27:50 GMT
How did the Drug [War] operate in a discriminatory manner?
Michelle Alexander discusses the origins of the “War on Drugs” at length in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The excerpts below highlight some of the prevailing themes she expressed on this topic.
“In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration's War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation… By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined ‘others’” (Alexander, p. 49). President Reagan capitalized on the fear of the insurgence of racial minorities in order to campaign his idea for the large-scale assault on drugs in America. This scheme may have seemed benign to many Americans at the time, but was however, an underhanded way of targeting racial minorities.
“Joblessness and crack swept inner cities precisely at the moment that a fierce backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was manifesting itself through the War on Drugs” (Alexander, p. 51). These happenings caused the very problems voters were afraid of when they bought-in to the rhetoric being used by the politicians they voted for.
“In June 1986, Newsweek declared crack to be the biggest story since Vietnam/Watergate, and in August of that year, Time magazine termed crack "the issue of the year." Thousands of stories about the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and newsstands, and the stories had a clear racial subtext” (Alexander, p. 52). The media saturation of the crack epidemic only heightened the awareness of the American public to a problem they had not thought much about before the idea of the “Drug War” was formulated and presented to them as a fix-all solution to the racial tensions of the time.
The “Drug War” was sprouted out of a fear of nonwhites and of the idea that the preservation of “Law and Order” among acceptable groups of Americans was paramount. One aspect of this plan that struck the minority communities of America especially hard was the differentiation between sentences given for the possession/sale of crack cocaine, and that of powder cocaine. “[The] Drug Abuse Act of 1986… included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites” (Alexander, p. 53).
Michelle Alexander discusses the origins of the “War on Drugs” at length in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The excerpts below highlight some of the prevailing themes she expressed on this topic.
“In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration's War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the nation… By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined ‘others’” (Alexander, p. 49). President Reagan capitalized on the fear of the insurgence of racial minorities in order to campaign his idea for the large-scale assault on drugs in America. This scheme may have seemed benign to many Americans at the time, but was however, an underhanded way of targeting racial minorities.
“Joblessness and crack swept inner cities precisely at the moment that a fierce backlash against the Civil Rights Movement was manifesting itself through the War on Drugs” (Alexander, p. 51). These happenings caused the very problems voters were afraid of when they bought-in to the rhetoric being used by the politicians they voted for.
“In June 1986, Newsweek declared crack to be the biggest story since Vietnam/Watergate, and in August of that year, Time magazine termed crack "the issue of the year." Thousands of stories about the crack crisis flooded the airwaves and newsstands, and the stories had a clear racial subtext” (Alexander, p. 52). The media saturation of the crack epidemic only heightened the awareness of the American public to a problem they had not thought much about before the idea of the “Drug War” was formulated and presented to them as a fix-all solution to the racial tensions of the time.
The “Drug War” was sprouted out of a fear of nonwhites and of the idea that the preservation of “Law and Order” among acceptable groups of Americans was paramount. One aspect of this plan that struck the minority communities of America especially hard was the differentiation between sentences given for the possession/sale of crack cocaine, and that of powder cocaine. “[The] Drug Abuse Act of 1986… included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites” (Alexander, p. 53).