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.
Of course we all know that blacks are arrested, prosecuted and jailed out of all proportion to their numbers, most notably with respect to the war on drugs, when data have repeatedly shown that drug use is virtually identical across racial boundaries. And some of us even recall the role that felony disfranchisement played in letting George W. Bush close enough to steal the 2000 election. But what Alexander does here is focus attention on what was previously hidden in plain sight--the much broader, much deeper, systematic effect of such selective law enforcement in re-legalizing second-class status for a majority of adult black men, and an increasing number of black women as well.
If we want to know what's wrong with the promise of Obama, if we want to truly, deeply grasp the nature of the gap between the promise and the reality, there is not better way, no clearer picture than that drawn by Alexander.
On Democracy Now! she elaborated:
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they're ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.
Think of that. Think long and hard. Think 10 to 20 years. Think 20 to life. Think Scooter Libby getting off without serving a day, even after being convicted. Think about all the rest of the Bush Administration war criminals, and how Obama dismissed his Nuremberg obligations to hold them accountable, saying he wanted to "look forward, not look back."
Think who the real criminals are, and who exactly it is who believes in--and stands for--democracy. Think what would happen if one of these millions were to stand before a judge and argue that he shouldn't be charged, because the judge should "look forward, not look back."
Then there's the trivial nature of the crimes alleged--crimes whose triviality is readily recognized, day in, day out, when the offenders are middle-class whites:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the-in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for-or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the-both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That's right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.
The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party's grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear-appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats-white, you know, working-class poor Democrats-to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.
And the strategy worked like a charm. You know, within weeks of the Reagan administration's publicity campaign around crack cocaine, you know, images of black crack users and crack dealers flooded, you know, our nation's television sets and forever changed our nation's conception of who drug users and dealers are. And law enforcement efforts became targeted on poor communities of color in the drug war. And drug law enforcement agencies, state and local law enforcement task forces committed to drug law enforcement, have been rewarded for drastically increasing the volume of drug arrests. Federal funding flows to state and local law enforcement that boost the volume of drug arrests, the sheer numbers.
Many people think the drug war, you know, has been targeted at violent offenders or aimed at rooting out drug kingpins, but nothing could be further from the truth. Local and state law enforcement agencies get rewarded for the sheer numbers of drug arrests. And federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement officials to keep 80 percent of the cash, cars, homes that they seize from suspected drug offenders, granting to law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability and longevity in the drug war.
And the results have been predictable. Millions of poor people of color have been rounded up for relatively minor nonviolent drug offenses. In fact, in 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession. Only one out of five were for sales. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity. And during the 1990s, the period of the greatest expansion of the drug war, nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests were for marijuana possession, a drug now widely believed to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class and suburban white communities as it is in the ghetto.
Today, we can look back in stunned horror on the late 1800s, a period marked by waves of racial hysteria, and mass lynchings of black men (which actually persisted for decades into the 20th Century), all thinly justified by invocations of rape that were deemed so heinous it was considered intolerable to even try to make sure that the right offender was hanged--let alone to inquire if there were actually even an offense committed in the first place.
And yet, for all the bloody horror of that time, the greatest impact was that of intimidation on an entire people. The numbers of those hanged was "only" a few hundred or so a year. In our time, the number of blacks incarcerated and deprived of their rights is roughly a thousand times that.
How, then, will people a hundred years from now, look back on us today?
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