Americans want to believe they live in a just society, one where hard work and perseverance is rewarded no matter who you are, where you came from, or how wealthy or poor your parents were. This the essence of the American Dream.
Those who have done really well and enjoy a high standard of living especially want to believe this because it feeds into the narrative that they have earned, and therefore deserve, their wealth and high social status. This “just world” preconception causes many Americans to be easily persuaded that those who haven’t done so well are lazy or conniving (seeking to live off government handouts) and thus are undeserving of help.
It’s not fair to judge without knowing a particular individual’s story. I myself have been guilty of painting with too broad a brush in the way I’ve thought about the poor in the past, particularly about poor people of color. It’s all to easy to do as a white person brought up in a middle class conservative household as I was.
The notion that the basic operating rules of American society unfairly penalize some people is an unnatural thought for many and tends to be rejected without sufficient consideration. For those who have done well economically, it’s also vaguely unsettling, even threatening, because it implies they might not actually be so deserving of what they have.
Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow is a sobering reminder of how unfair the basic operating rules of American society have been to African Americans in the past, and, sadly, continue to be to this day to far too many. We pride ourselves on how colorblind our society has become and delude ourselves into thinking we’ve left racism behind us. In truth, we’ve not become so much colorblind as blind to the injustice that still exists around us. For many, the change has been more about semantics than reality.
Openly racist terminology has been replaced with “law and order” rhetoric. This is especially true of our political discourse since the late 1960s. Because of this, we’ve allowed the development of a criminal “justice” system which labels African Americans as criminals, felons, often for minor drug offenses or sometimes no offense at all, and then “legally” strips them of their civil rights, including their right to vote, at a rate we should all find alarming.
Even after they leave prison and finish parole, the criminal label is used to discriminate against them as they struggle to find employment and housing and to recover a sense of dignity and self-worth. And this discrimination is all quite legal under our current laws. Even if they are able to avoid a return to prison, most remain second-class citizens, social pariahs, for the rest of their lives. If that’s not cruel and unusual punishment, I don’t know what is.
What makes the punishment particularly cruel is that most did not commit a violent crime. Worse, some did not commit a crime at all. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and then accepted an ill advised plea deal offered by an overzealous prosecutor. Since so much of the so-called War on Drugs has been conducted in poor, inner city, black neighborhoods, for reasons which are more about politics than crime, it is unsurprising that so many of those who end up with criminal records for drug-related offenses are black.
Alexander makes the argument, which I find compelling, that our current system of mass incarceration is in effect the reincarnation of Jim Crow. She points out what while studies show African Americans are not significantly more likely to violate drug laws than whites, they are dramatically more likely to end up in prison. Once branded as felons, they are permanently segregated from mainstream society in a manner just as demeaning as anything which happened under Jim Crow.
In a further cruel twist, impoverished inner-city black ghettos, a product of the old Jim Crow, are the hunting grounds most favored by drug law enforcement in the new Jim Crow era. The claim that this is just because that’s where the drug crime is, and has nothing to do with race, rings hollow to me. It sounds a lot more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Alexander further notes that while the War on Drugs has become the new Jim Crow for African Americans, it has also victimized large numbers of Hispanics. Since our drug laws are written without reference to race, even whites have been affected, though the amount of discretion given to police and prosecutors by the courts has meant the application of the law has been disproportionately directed at low income people of color. In this sense, the War on Drugs could more accurately be called the War on the Poor, especially the black and brown poor.
Just as distressing is that an industry valued at nearly $200 billion annually and employing millions has built up around the policy of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs. Increasing privatization means we now have companies whose investors and employees have a financial interest in having the flow of prisoners entering the penal system continue unabated or even increase. The most efficient way to do this is to keep the ghetto-to-prison pipeline as full as possible — guilt or innocence be damned.
There’s also the preferential placement of prison facilities in rural, predominantly white communities, creating a disturbing parallel to the plantations of the old South. The positive impact of these prisons on local economies smacks of the kind of racial bribe used by plantation owners when poor whites were employed in slave patrols and as plantation foremen, giving them a financial stake in preserving the institution of slavery.
As I’m quite sure is the case for many of my fellow white Americans, I had no idea so many people of color are being treated this unjustly by our “colorblind” society until I read Alexander’s book. And I feel a deep sense of shame that this is so. The American society she describes is not the one I thought I lived in.
We must amend our excessively punitive drug laws and re-introduce justice into our criminal justice system. Allowing the current situation to continue is not only morally wrong, in the end, it endangers us all.
As Martin Luther King Jr. put it so simply and eloquently:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Read the book. It’s a real eye opener.