Michelle Alexander's book the New Jim Crow is an illuminating read. Her main thesis is that after each stage of ostensible social progress to overturn systemic racism, the white power establishment worked to preserve their privilege in the new regime in creative ways. Her argument is compelling and she cites two main transitions.
First, after the abolition movement and the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, racism flourished for nearly a century under the Jim Crow system During this time, the white power establishment intimidated, killed, and then even more powerfully, encoded into law a system of apartheid - the idea of "separate but equal." It was a creative but non-subtle measure of encoding racism into the new system and preserving as much privilege for whites as possible.
Second, as the civil right movement brought about change in "separate but equal," the white power establishment moved to preserve racism systematically via one primary system ("the drug war") and a multitude of other policy stances. But you dont have to take her word for it, you can listen to the words of two powerful Republicans during this time:
"The whole problem is really the blacks. They key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to..." (H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff)
"You start out by saying n*****, n*****, n*****. By 1968, you can't say n***** - that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and the byproduct of them is blacks getting hurt more than whites...'We want to cut this' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than n*****, n*****" (Lee Atwater, Advisor to Ronald Reagan)
The "war on drugs," was launched by Nixon in 1971 but fully burgeoned in the 1908s under the Reagan administration. The confluence of the crack epidemic, HIV, and perceptions of increasing crime presenting the Reagan administration with an opening they desired. For example, only 2-6% of Americans saw drugs as the most important problem in the country in 1985. In 1989, it reached a remarkable 64%! The Reagan administration used this opportunity to institutionalize draconian and racist drug laws that have eviscerated black society for decades. Somewhat conveniently, the same figure stood at 10% by 1990. This despite the fact that violent crime was as high or higher in 1991 and 1992 as it was in the late 80s. The war on drugs continues today even though (1) it has been an absolute failure in ending the drug trade and (2) even though all crime has steadily fallen 50% from the peak in 1991! It has been successful in one way though: incarcerating an unprecedented number of black Americans, which could be argued was the original goal. The leading cause of the incarceration of African American men is non-violent drug offense.
Drug laws provide a clever cover for racism because ostensible, because drug laws seem like a good thing. And as Atwater so eloquently stated, the war on drugs is not obviously racist. But dig underneath and it becomes clearer. .
Drug laws encode racism in three ways. First, the sentencing of laws is racist. For example, sentencing for drugs used predominantly by poor blacks (crack) were 100 times as punitive as laws for drugs used by more diverse populations (cocaine) even though crack and cocaine are not substantially different. Second, the drug market has a long value chain, from inputs, to production, to transportation and distribution, to dealers, to consumption, to money laundering. In this process, street-level dealers and consumers are the least powerful and most black and also the most punished. It makes no sense to primarily target street-level dealers and consumers if your goal is to end the drug trade. It makes a lot more sense when you goal is something else. Third, drug laws are selectively enforced.
There is much more to think and write about on this topic but in the meantime I recommend reading Michelle Alexander's book.
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