Start a Revolution Against the War on Drugs
John McWhorter
JANUARY 19, 2015
The idea of a “New Civil Rights Movement” is hopeless. The civil rights revolution was due not only to relentless effort, but a confluence of factors that made them bear fruit in a way they hadn’t for centuries before. Amid the Cold War, segregation was embarrassing as P.R. Restrictions on immigration since the 1920s had made it easier to draw focus to black people. Television was new. Republicans were chastened after Barry Goldwater’s defeat.
There is nothing equivalent today. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to sit still; we just need to narrow our focus. Any uptick in “revolutionary” ideas among blacks in our moment is founded largely in what happened to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford last year, and it is on the prevalence of such cases that we must indeed focus. The poisonous relationship between black men and police forces is the key to why we never really get past race.
Racism expresses itself in other ways, but no cognitively resilient group of people feels “oppressed” in a day to day sense by wealth gaps or dumb things people can say. A world with no racism at all would be like a world without dirt, and playing fields -- made of dirt -- are never perfectly level. Few black people would deny any of that.
So many feel so oppressed because of a sense of cops as more likely to kill them for thin or nonexistent reasons. As such, black America must call for an end to the War on Drugs, which sends cops into black neighborhoods to disturb people in the name of a conclusively failed effort, and stokes up animus and paranoia in cops and blacks alike that helps create situations like Ferguson.
Many say black men are more likely to be murdered by one another. Much of that, however, also traces to the War on Drugs. Black boys grow up with fathers locked up and seek validation elsewhere. With drugs illegal, they sell for a markup that provides an ever tempting alternative to legal work for black men underserved by poor schools. No War on Drugs, no drug gangs. Black lives would change.
continued here http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebat...a/start-a-revolution-against-the-war-on-drugs
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John McWhorter
John McWhorter
JANUARY 19, 2015
The idea of a “New Civil Rights Movement” is hopeless. The civil rights revolution was due not only to relentless effort, but a confluence of factors that made them bear fruit in a way they hadn’t for centuries before. Amid the Cold War, segregation was embarrassing as P.R. Restrictions on immigration since the 1920s had made it easier to draw focus to black people. Television was new. Republicans were chastened after Barry Goldwater’s defeat.
There is nothing equivalent today. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to sit still; we just need to narrow our focus. Any uptick in “revolutionary” ideas among blacks in our moment is founded largely in what happened to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford last year, and it is on the prevalence of such cases that we must indeed focus. The poisonous relationship between black men and police forces is the key to why we never really get past race.
Racism expresses itself in other ways, but no cognitively resilient group of people feels “oppressed” in a day to day sense by wealth gaps or dumb things people can say. A world with no racism at all would be like a world without dirt, and playing fields -- made of dirt -- are never perfectly level. Few black people would deny any of that.
So many feel so oppressed because of a sense of cops as more likely to kill them for thin or nonexistent reasons. As such, black America must call for an end to the War on Drugs, which sends cops into black neighborhoods to disturb people in the name of a conclusively failed effort, and stokes up animus and paranoia in cops and blacks alike that helps create situations like Ferguson.
Many say black men are more likely to be murdered by one another. Much of that, however, also traces to the War on Drugs. Black boys grow up with fathers locked up and seek validation elsewhere. With drugs illegal, they sell for a markup that provides an ever tempting alternative to legal work for black men underserved by poor schools. No War on Drugs, no drug gangs. Black lives would change.
continued here http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebat...a/start-a-revolution-against-the-war-on-drugs
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John McWhorter
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/amstudies/faculty.html#mcwhorter
