Here’s a cutting from another awesome post from Stowe Boyd’s underpaidgenius blog (that I edited down despite Boyd’s demand) called “The Drug Wars Are The New Jim Crow”:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
SLICE…
Read the entire piece.
We are living in a police state, but it is one hundred times worse if you are black.
The net result of the drug wars has been to create a permanent undercaste — mostly young black men — disenfranchised, and unable to participate in a meaningful way in American society.
Yeah, the rest of that is stuff we’ve all heard before—the truth is, you don’t need to read it again because you already know that statistically our society is still absurdly racist. The important thing to read in that post, in my opinion, is Boyd’s own commentary:
We are living in a police state, but it is one hundred times worse if you are black.
The net result of the drug wars has been to create a permanent undercaste — mostly young black men — disenfranchised, and unable to participate in a meaningful way in American society.
I’ve emboldened the part I think is extra important. All you have to do is look at the statistics to know how much harder it is for blacks to make it in the world. Then again, it’s hard for *any* person born into poverty to be able to “participate in a meaningful way in American society.”
Until we can retool our society to *actually* make opportunities equally available for *all*, there will always be this dynamic. The symptom is institutionalized racism, but the disease is an unequal world for us all.
