The New Jim Crow

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took
his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th
president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been
celebrating our nation's "triumph over race." Obama's election has
been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend
placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama's mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that
"the land of the free" has finally made good on its promise of
equality. There's an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his
appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is
what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or
relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us.
Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the
promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they
can be counted on one hand. 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:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today
-- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in
1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to
felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth
Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right
to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both
parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent
disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to
the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African
American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life.
(In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of
a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by
law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote,
automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against
in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much
as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow
era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime
rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more
than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant
crime. We're told that the reason so many black and brown men find
themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class
status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The
uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the
sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the
past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades
-- they are currently are at historical lows -- but imprisonment rates
have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority
of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone
account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate
population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison
population.

The drug war has been brutal -- complete with SWAT teams, tanks,
bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods -- but
those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation
wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor
communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people
of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.
In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more
likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion
that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is
belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times
the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their
African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's
prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug
offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all
drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That's
why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not
middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those
drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a
living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it's all about violent
crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the
current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising.
From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly
everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a
grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially
coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor
and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened
by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of
H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff:
"[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a
system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the
streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on
this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for
publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and
drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and
violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war
which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars
in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug
dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would
saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures
nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass
harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes -- sentences longer
than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could
be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill
Clinton's boastful words, "I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say
I'm soft on crime." The facts bear him out. Clinton's "tough on
crime" policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state
prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was
not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the "New
Democrats" championed legislation banning drug felons from public
housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public
benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually
every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly
legal, if you've been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn't
the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that's where the
violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes... in made-for-TV
movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or
violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that
increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most
successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war
is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug
forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep
for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug
suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in
the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en
masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four
out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for
sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even
of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s -- the
period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war -- nearly 80% of
the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug
generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least
as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an
astonishingly short period of time -- a new Jim Crow system. Millions
of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally
denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for
and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial
reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become
CEOs or corporate lawyers -- not to mention president of the United
States -- causes us all to marvel at what a long way we've come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth.
In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were
when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner
cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live
below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in
1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was
then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third
World countries. And that's with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our
"colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a
familiar social, political, and economic structure -- the structure of
racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at
the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream. This is not the
promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring
racial nightmare.