Police Brutality: The New Jim Crow — PT 2

In a ‘post-racial America’, color-blind rhetoric is crafted to continue white supremacy. And is used to create the current incarceration system through the War On Drugs in the 80s and 90s. This episode follows how politicians, media, and white resentment work together to put millions of Black people in the incarceration system. Hint: It's all in what's left unsaid.

Transcript

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In this episode host Anita Kirti teaches us about how the war on drugs was built and how twenty years later it still disproportionately affects the Black community with 1.7 million people in the criminal justice system.

3 Key Points:
1.   Through the war on drugs, politicians of both major parties used codified rhetoric to stir up white fear and instituted punitive policies that targeted Black people.

2.   In the 1980s, the media amplified the idea of Black criminality through their coverage of crack use in America.  

3.   In the 1990s, major crime bills were passed with serious implications to our criminal justice system that disproportionately affect Black people. 

Episode Highlights: 

• Barry Goldwater used dog-whistle politics during his 1964 campaign. He tapped into white backlash and this beame foundational to the way the Republican Party works.
• The Republican Party’s Southern strategy was to use gaslighting on a political scale. 
• Oppressive policies were proposed that were not considered racist because they relied on a reductive definition of racism.
• Nixon used coded racism that won him the presidency.
• Nixon took the idea of criminality and applied it to drugs. Being anti-drug was socially acceptable, so they could institute punitive policies that targeted Black people.
• Nixon put a significant amount of money into treatment funding and also created the DEA.
• Under Nixon, you started seeing the funding of local police from the federal government, no-knock warrants, mandatory minimums for narcotics, and civil forfeiture. This disproportionately targeted Black people.
• The war on drugs was the first attempt at a narrative that coupled Black criminality and drugs.
• Following Nixon's administration, there was a lull in the war on drugs. Carter campaigned on decriminalizing marijuana use. 
• Reagan recognized the political power of white resentment politics. He used colorblind law and order rhetoric to stir up white fear.
• In the early 70s, cocaine was introduced to wealthy white Americans. There was a genuine belief that it was harmless. The demand then increased and cartels began to supply cocaine to America.
• In the 70s there's also a move to deindustrialization. There was a huge loss of low skill jobs in inner cities.
• In the early 80s, crack cocaine was invented. By the mid-80s, it moved into inner cities. People in the inner cities started participating in the drug trade as a way to make money.
• Crack democratized cocaine. Unlike the hierarchical cocaine trade, the sale of crack didn't work the same way.
• Crack essentially devastated Black communities with violence and addiction.
• Discrepancies between how Black and white users were treated can be directly attributed to bias because crack and cocaine are pharmacologically the same.
• The media provided a bridge between the political narrative about drugs and the developing issue around cocaine and crack use.
• Len Bias, a promising NBA player, died in June 1986 and rumors circulated that he died because of using crack. He actually died after using cocaine. 
• The media realized that people responded to hysteric coverage of crack use.
• Crack was portrayed as a super drug that transformed Black people into violent criminals. The media shamelessly amplified the idea of Black criminality.
• Congress introduced a bill before the midterm election that promised to be tough on crime. This was the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
• There was a huge shift to zero-tolerance policies. Mandatory minimums were passed during this time. This took out judiciary discretion.
• Mandatory minimums were very different for cocaine possession vs. crack possession.
• Politicians instigated white resentment and fear and they were subsequently assuaging it by passing tough-on-crime bills. The media created an alarmist scenario using hyperbole and misinformation. The white middle class now had a justifiable way to express their racial bias.
• George Bush doubled prison capacity and enlarged the criminal justice system. Democrats at the time thought he wasn't being tough enough.
• Bill Clinton passed the 1994 Crime Bill which called for even more policing.
• In 1995, the U.S. Sentencing Commission issued a report showing that more whites were using crack, but 96% of those prosecuted with Blacks or Latinos. They recommended changing the 100:1 ratio of the mandatory minimums. They recommended this change two other times and were ignored each time.
• In the early 2000s the war on drugs died out but left behind a monstrosity of a criminal justice system.