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June 10 - June 18, 2025
Every system of injustice depends on the silence, paralysis, confusion, and cooperation of those it seeks to eliminate or control.
Back in the 1980s and 90s, Democratic and Republican politicians leaned heavily on racial stereotypes of “crack heads,” “crack babies,” “super-predators,” and “welfare queens,” to mobilize public support for the War on Drugs, a “get-tough” movement, and a prison-building boom.
public enemy number one in the 2016 election was a brown-skinned immigrant, an “illegal,” a “terrorist,” or a “caravan” full of people who want to take your job, rape your daughter, or commit an act of terror. As Trump put it: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems…. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
And it didn’t matter that African Americans weren’t actually taking white people’s jobs or college educations in significant numbers through affirmative action programs. Getting tough on “them”—the racially defined “others” who could easily be used as scapegoats and cast as the enemy—was all that mattered. Facts were treated as largely irrelevant then. As they are now.
Obama was the first sitting president to visit a federal corrections facility, the first to oversee a drop in the federal prison population in more than thirty years, and he granted clemency to nearly two thousand people behind bars—the highest total for any
president since President Harry Truman. His administration enacted significant policy changes, including, among others, legislation reducing sentencing disparities involving crack and powder cocaine, a temporary ban on federal contracts with private prisons, and limitations on the transfer of military equipment to local police departments.
Drug crimes remain the largest category of arrests. According to the Pew Research Center, eight out of ten people on probation and two-thirds of the people on parole have been convicted of nonviolent crimes.
Twice as many people are on probation or parole in this country as are locked in literal cages.
The safest communities are
not the ones with the most police, prisons, or electronic monitors, but the ones with quality schools, health care, housing, plentiful jobs, and strong social networks that allow families not merely to survive but to thrive.
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez is among those who have begun to connect the dots between mass incarceration and mass deportation. In her brilliant essay “Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” she chronicles how these systems have emerged as dual, interlocking forms of social control that relegate “aliens” and “felons” to a racialized caste of outsiders. The system of mass incarceration created a legal framework by which the rights and benefits of citizenship are routinely stripped away from millions of U.S. citizens labeled “criminals” and
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they mirror (and, at times, dip below) those of non-citizen immigrants within the United States. This extraordinary development has coincided with the criminalization of immigration in the United States, resulting in a new class of “illegal immigrants” and “aliens” who are viewed and treated as criminals. Immigration violations that were once treated as minor civil infractions are now crimes. And everyday legal infractions, ranging from shoplifting to marijuana possession to traffic violations, now routinely trigger one of the state’s most devastating sanctions—deportation.
White people are generally allowed to have problems, and they’ve historically been
granted the power to define and respond to them. But people of color—in this “land of the free” forged through slavery and genocide—are regularly viewed and treated as the problem.
This distinction has made all the difference. Once human beings are defined as the problem in the public consciousness, their elimination through deportation, incarcerati...
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In short, mass incarceration and mass deportation have less to do with crime and immigration than the ways we’ve chosen to respond to those issues when black and brown people are framed as the problem.
Rationalizing mass incarceration or mass deportation on the
grounds that it is meant to rid our nation of “criminals” perpetuates the false notion that “criminals” are a monolithic, deviant group that is fundamentally different than “us” and therefore unworthy of our concern. They can be eliminated without a second thought.
Baldwin!), “It is this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and
every racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world.”
In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.8
Throughout our history, there have been African Americans who, for a variety of reasons, have defended or been complicit with the prevailing system of control.
The fact that some African Americans have experienced great success in recent years does not mean that something akin to a racial caste system no longer exists. No caste system in the United States has ever governed all black people; there have always been “free blacks” and black success stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow.
This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American hierarchy.
therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race—uncivilized savages—thus providing a justification for the extermination of the native peoples.6
The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives.
Federalism—the division of power between the states and the federal government—was the device employed to protect the institution of slavery and the political power of slaveholding states.
Under the terms of our country’s founding document, slaves were defined as three-fifths of a person not a real, whole human being. Upon this racist fiction rests the entire structure of American democracy.
White supremacy, over time, became a religion of sorts. Faith in the idea that people of the African race were bestial, that whites were inherently superior, and that slavery was, in fact, for blacks’ own good, served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites in the so-called New World.
“Racial division was a consequence, not a precondition of slavery, but once it was instituted it became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency all its own.”10 After the death of slavery, the idea of race lived on.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime.
Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans.
“As long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them.”
Members of Congress who voted against civil rights measures proactively designed crime legislation and actively fought for their proposals.”48
Conservatives argued that poverty was caused not by structural factors related to race and class but rather by culture—particularly black culture.
As described by sociologist Katherine Beckett, “The (alleged) misbehaviors of the poor were transformed from adaptations to poverty that had the unfortunate effect of reproducing it into character failings that accounted for poverty in the first place.”
Black “welfare cheats” and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery.
As explained by Thomas and Mary Edsall in their insightful book Chain Reaction, a disproportionate share of the costs of integration and racial equality had been borne by lower- and lower-middle-class whites, who were suddenly forced to compete on equal terms with blacks for jobs and status and who lived in neighborhoods adjoining black ghettos.
example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi—the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964—he assured the crowd “I believe in states’ rights,” and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them.67 His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar—arguing that
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Practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.74 Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 to $1,026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million.75 By contrast, funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984, and antidrug funds allocated to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.76
Yet by 1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent.80
study of urban black fathers found that only 28 percent had access to an automobile. The rate fell to 18 percent for those living in ghetto areas.
The decline in legitimate employment opportunities among innercity residents created economic desperation, leading some to sell drugs—most notably crack cocaine.
Later that month, the Senate proposed even tougher antidrug legislation, and shortly thereafter, the president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine—associated with whites.
Whites, on average, are more punitive than blacks, despite the fact that blacks are far more likely to be victims of crime. Rural whites are often the most punitive, even though they are least likely to be crime victims.93 The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.
As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, “the Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state inmate populations of any president in American history.”100
lifetime ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense—including simple possession of marijuana.
“effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the urban poor.”102
In his announcement of the “One Strike and You’re Out” Initiative, Clinton explained: “From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime and peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.”103 The new rule promised to be “the toughest admission and eviction policy that HUD has implemented.”104 Thus, for countless poor people, particularly racial minorities targeted by the drug war, public housing was no longer available, leaving many of them homeless—locked out not only of mainstream society, but their own homes.
