How to Begin De-Fanging The Isms in the System
In 1890, the Amazon.com of its time was the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. You could order clothing, a gramophone, a tractor, food (including mail-order chickens), bicycles, and cocaine.
Cocaine? WTF?
At the time, cocaine was completely legal and for $1.50 one could purchase through the mail, a syringe and a small amount of cocaine to aid in the pain of a toothache.
The Smoking Opium Exclusion Act in 1909 banned the possession, importation and use of opium for smoking. However, opium could still be used as a medication. This was the first federal law to ban the non-medical use of a substance, although many states and counties had banned alcohol sales previously.
The Harrison Act was passed in 1914 which regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and cocaine.
In 1937, marijuana was legally taxed.
For most of American history, drugs were legal and regulated. Then came Nixon and the War on Drugs was afoot.
During a 1994 interview, President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, provided inside information suggesting that the War on Drugs campaign had ulterior motives, which mainly involved helping Nixon keep his job.
In the interview, conducted by journalist Dan Baum and published in Harper magazine, Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon campaign had two enemies: “the antiwar left and black people.” His comments led many to question Nixon’s intentions in advocating for drug reform and whether racism played a role.
Ehrlichman was quoted as saying: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
If there is a single reason used to explain the imbalance in the incarceration of black men in the United States, it is less systemic racism and more the criminalization of recreational drugs.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than four out of five drug-related arrests are for possession of illegal substances. Police departments all over the country spend a majority of their resources and time arresting people for drug charges than for anything else by more than triple.
You want to reform our criminal justice system in a meaningful way? Remove the burden on police to focus on drug possession. The result would free up such a massive amount of money and time, remove the onus of criminal activity away from our poorest citizens, and allow room for police to reform practices and policies.
After fifty years of puritanical drug laws, the War on Drugs has made illegal drugs more available rather than less while making more people criminal. It has pushed the drug markets underground where they cannot be taxed, regulated, or monitored. Today drugs are cheaper and easier for people to buy while creating a sub-class of routine lawbreakers in every demographic.
The minimum wage was conceived as a way to help bolster wageworkers and decrease class stratification. It was first introduced in the United States with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). Passed under President Roosevelt, this act called for the first national minimum wage of 25 cents an hour. This created a floor on wages in the labor market and overall helped to create fairer labor standards throughout the country.
Simply put, the minimum wage was a method to ensure the wealthy couldn’t get too wealthy and the poor could get a living wage in order to supply the capital needed for the economic engine to move. Without an adequate and progressive minimum wage two things occur in tandem: the wealthy become Jeff Bezos and poverty envelopes a larger and larger percentage of the population.
Those wallowing in the depths of being perpetually and systemically broke have to do something to fucking survive like, I don’t know, sell drugs. Which are currently illegal and feeds a criminal justice system designed to incarcerate these poverty-stricken folks. The problem isn’t systemic racism. The problem is systemic classism. It is an economic imbalance that can be easily remedied.
Public schools in the United States are funded by a variety of methods but over half of the nation’s public education is paid for through local property taxes. Which means those poor people out there selling and buying drugs also have the least funded schools and the least available opportunity to pull themselves out of poverty via higher education. This, again, is less about systemic racism than it is about property values and how schools are paid for.
You can’t scold bigotry out of people. You can’t shame them from being prejudice. You can separate what is racist (attitudes and opinions that fuel systemic inequity) from the mechanisms that proliferate racist results. Pragmatics and economics always solves problems in authentic ways. Moralizing and demonizing solves nothing but sure makes a ton of money for “experts” on diversity.
How to eradicate the affects of racism and classism in America is to reconfigure the tools used by bigots and the greedy.
Fund all public schools equally across the board.
Establish a progressive minimum wage that increases with the cost of living.
Legalize drug use and regulate the purchase and sale.
That wasn’t so hard, right?
