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May 29, 2020
Equally worrisome was the state of the economy.
Most white people believed African Americans lacked the proper motivation to work, prompting the provisional Southern legislatures to adopt the notorious black codes.
codes were intended to establish systems of peonage resembling slavery, others foreshadowed Jim Crow laws by prohibiting, among other things, interracial seating in the first-class sections of railroad cars and by segregating schools.
main purpose of the codes was to control the freedmen,
Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws—which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks—
was to establish another system of forced labor.
Reconstruction Era.
Reconstruction Era brought the expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency charged with the responsibility of providing food, clothing, fuel, and other forms of assistance to destitute former slaves.
states to impose poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices to prevent blacks from voting.
Most blacks were too poor to sue to enforce their civil rights,
Meanwhile, the separation of the races had begun to emerge as a comprehensive pattern throughout the South, driven in large part by the rhetoric of the planter elite,
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime.
the court put to rest any notion that convicts were legally distinguishable from slaves:
It was the nation’s first prison boom and, as they are today, those taken prisoner were disproportionately black.
African Americans found themselves, once again, virtually defenseless. The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come.
quest for Redemption, including fraud, intimidation, bribery, and terror.
These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a sense of superiority over blacks,
“As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.”
Dominant whites concluded that it was in their political and economic interest to scapegoat blacks, and “permission to hate” came from sources that had formerly denied it,
Just as the white elite had successfully driven a wedge between poor whites and blacks
efforts by white elites to decimate a
multiracial alliance of poor people.
The new racial order, known as Jim Crow—a term apparently derived from a minstrel show character—was regarded as the “final settlement,” the “return to sanity,” and “the permanent system.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally dismantled the Jim Crow system of discrimination in public accommodations, employment, voting, education, and federally financed activities.
at the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, activists and others began to turn their attention to economic problems,
This process took place with the understanding that whatever the new order would be, it would have to be formally race-neutral—it could not involve explicit or clearly intentional race discrimination.
Barred by law from invoking race explicitly, those committed to racial hierarchy were forced to search for new means of achieving their goals
appealing to old racist sentiments,
“law and order”
For more than a decade—from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s—conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.
Beginning in the 1960s, crime rates rose in the United States for a period of about ten years.
explained in large part by the rise of the “baby boom” generation—the spike in the number of young men in the fifteen-to-twenty-four age group, which historically has been responsible for most crimes.
occurring at precisely the same time that unemployment rates for black men were rising sharply,
The racial imagery associated with the riots gave fuel to
aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime,
They developed instead the racially sanitized rhetoric of “cracking down on crime”—rhetoric that is now used freely by politicians of every stripe.
“rather than fading, the segregationists’ crime-race argument was reframed, with a slightly different veneer,”
Southern Strategy.
appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy,
creating and maintaining a racially polarized political environment.
Liberals, by contrast, insisted that social reforms such as the War on Poverty and civil rights legislation would get at the “root causes” of criminal behavior and stressed the social conditions that predictably generate crime. Lyndon
mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters, many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans.
“the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the income distribution against each other intensified the view among many whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged—particularly for disadvantaged blacks—is the responsibility of those afflicted, and not the responsibility of the larger society.”
conservatives generally gave lip service to the goal of racial equality
strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race.
disaffected whites—
In the early 1980s, just as the drug war was kicking off, inner-city communities were suffering from economic collapse.
To make matters worse, dramatic technological changes revolutionized the workplace—
The impact of globalization and deindustrialization was felt most strongly in black inner-city communities.
The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among innercity residents created economic desperation, leading some to sell drugs—most notably crack cocaine.
