The Mechanics Of The New Jim Crow

In a previous post I mentioned having read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

I just saw a Jon Stewart discussion with a friend about racism in America.

It just set me off.

A sort of curious confluence between Jon and Michelle occurred.

And I feel compelled to document it.

The way the new Jim Crow works is that you pass federal laws making cocaine use a crime tantamount to genocide (actually worse; nobody ever gets convicted of genocide) and make massive multi-year sentences mandatory for being within miles of anything to do with cocaine - really that should be refined to say crack cocaine - that's what the law says; it conveniently entraps black people in its web because black people can't afford powder and don't have 20 dollar bills with which to snort it.

Once the law is in effect you send your police into predominantly black residential areas - sometimes called ghettos - and use some other cockamamy law that allows the cops to stop and search black people to search every young black man that the police encounter.

(It's bad cop stuff to stop and search young women - even black ones.)

And inevitably, some of those young black men end up having cocaine.

The cops, being resource constrained, they say, can't mount similar reigns of terror in predominantly white neighborhoods - and white rage at such an intrusion is bad politics - so the demographics of cocaine use in America are conveniently confined to the ghetto.

That's what the cops say; that's their story, and they are sticking to it.

Once in downtown cop-land most of the hapless young black Americans ensnared are offered a choice: "we're going to charge you with a violation that has a mandatory minimum sentence of 50 years, or you can plead guilty to possession and get 10 years".

Since the hostages offered this bargain have no way to hire a lawyer, they take 10 years.

Mostly.

Voila - we have a new slave population, and it is the same color as the one before emancipation.

And white American residential areas are totally free from the police state that their black fellow citizens have to endure.

Daily.

It's amusing, to some of us, that the cops don't go into Appalachian communities decimated by opioid abuse, mayhem and death.

They just wring their sweaty little cop hands, weep a little and say "how awful".

But then, they are all members of the Jackal Cult of Whiteness Uber Alles.

And god bless 'Merica.