A discussion about racial justice and economic inequality on Bill Moyers

[Ardent15]

BILL MOYERS: You have a quote in your book from President Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman: "The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." But wasn't there also an issue of punishing criminals and stopping crime? "

BRYAN STEVENSON: But I think that's where you have to really focus on what's a crime, and what's a threat to public safety, and what's something else? We've always had a commitment to stopping crime. And people convicted and charged with violent crimes were always people who were going to be arrested and prosecuted. And what's interesting is that over the last 35 years, there haven't been tremendous fluctuations in the violent crime rate in this country.

At the same time, we've gone from 300 thousand people in jails and prison in 1972, to 2.3 million people in jails and prisons today. With nearly 5 million people on probation and parole. Most of that is explained by this so-called war on drugs. And I think the point can't be overstated that when we talk about challenging drug use, we're not talking about challenging drug use throughout society. Because it, you know, this is actually one crime area where there aren't huge differences between black use and white use for illegal drugs. It's about the same.

We're, you know, black people are 13 percent of the population of this country. They're about 14 percent of the drug users. But they end up being about 60 percent of the people sent to prison. And so, here you have to focus on these policies and the targeting. And I think that that's what's meant by these policies. Is that we didn't have to incarcerate people for 10, 20, 30, 40 years for simple possession of marijuana, for drug use.

We didn't have to do that. We made choices around that. And now the consequences are devastating. I think they're not only devastating from a political perspective, but I think-- this is the way I think it relates to Jim Crow, as well. It's also been devastating within communities of color. Right now, for black men in the United States, there's a 32 percent chance you're going to jail or prison.

In poor communities and minority communities, urban communities, rural communities, it could be 60 percent or 70 percent. Well, what does that do? You're born, you're a ten-year-old kid. There's a 70 percent chance that you're going to go to jail and prison. What does that do to you? And the heartbreaking thing for me, and when I work in communities like that, is I see kids who are 13 and 14, who believe, who expect that they're going to go to prison.

And they tell me, "Mr. Stevenson, don't tell me about staying in school. I've got to go out here and get mine before I'm dead at 18 or 21 or I'm sent to prison for the rest of my life." And this culture of despair is a function of this so-called war on drugs, that is also like Jim Crow, because it has actually diminished the aspirations and hopes of people of color in ways that actually contribute to these cycles of violence and destruction. And hopelessness."

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The enemy in this war is not drugs. The enemy has been defined in racial terms. Now, if we were to look for drugs as aggressively in suburban, middle class white communities as we do in ghetto communities, we would have those kinds of stunning figures in middle class white communities, as well. And as Bryan indicated, you know, the rates of drug use are about the same. Among all racial groups. But also, and what many people don't realize is that the rates of drug sales are about the same among people of all different races.

Now, this defies our racial stereotypes, right? When we think of a drug dealer, we think of a black kid standing on street corner with his pants hanging down, right? Well, drug dealing certainly happens in the ghetto, but it happens everywhere else in America, as well. You know, a white kid in Nebraska doesn't get his marijuana or his meth by driving to the hood to get it. No, he gets it from a friend, a classmate, a coworker, who lives down the road.

BILL MOYERS:So, how-- why is it, Michelle, that the burden then falls the hardest on the people you've described? Young, black men in the inner cities?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well there's a number of reasons. Now, first, the enemy was defined politically as black and brown. For the reasons I described. Political reasons. It was part of the Republican Party's effort to prove they were getting tough on them. The people that many poor and working class whites had come to believe were taking their jobs and disrupting their lives through the social upheaval brought by the Civil Rights Movement.

The Reagan Administration actually hired staff whose job it was to publicize crack babies, crack dealers in inner city communities, in the hope that these images would build public support for the drug war and persuade Congress to devote millions of more dollars to the war.

So that it was possible to convert the war from a rhetorical one into a literal one. It was part of a larger political strategy. And once the media became saturated and our public consciousness began to associate drug use and drug crime with African Americans, it's no surprise that law enforcement efforts became concentrated in communities defined by race as well.

BRYAN STEVENSON: The reality is, is that in poor communities, the police do raids all the time. I've worked in communities where the SWAT team comes and they put up a screen fence around the public housing project. They do searches. They stop people coming in and out. There are these presumptions of criminality that follow young men of color.

And whenever they're someplace they don't belong, they're stopped and they're targeted. And so-- and because you don't have the resources actually to create privacy and security, you're much more vulnerable to prosecution. As Michelle said, you know, we could do the same thing, but middle class communities, elite schools in this country would not tolerate drug raids from federal law enforcement officers and police. Even if there's drug use.

And so, there is this way in which resources and economic status actually makes you more vulnerable to criminal arrest and prosecution. And it becomes a self-fulfilling story. So that when I walk down the street in the wrong kinds of clothes, if I'm in the "wrong place," there's a presumption that I'm up to something criminal.

And that means that a police officer being very rational, being very thoughtful, not necessarily being racist, has an interest in me and a concern about me that he's going to follow up on. Or that she's going to follow up on. And a lot of these things, I don't think are willfully or intentionally racist in the sense that I'm out to get people of color. But we have so embraced this image, this notion, this narrative about black criminality and drug use and all that sort of thing. We almost unconsciously accept that yes that person looks like a drug dealer.

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http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04022010/watch.html

[Raineyb]

1. The fact that this OP is sinking like a stone shows exactly how much we've gotten "past race"

which is to say we haven't at all.

Kick.