American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

Instead, let me offer a palpable example of what we might call color-blind racism in action. Consider the war on drugs, first declared by Ronald Reagan in 1982. The decision to make the prosecution of drug dealers and users a national priority had two unfortunate consequences: first, an exponential expansion of the prison population in the United States from 300,000 in 1980 to over 2 million in 2010, an incarceration rate nearly ten times higher than that of any industrialized nation in the world; second, the impact of the new drug war fell disproportionately on the black population, chiefly black males in America’s inner cities, where imprisonment became the presumed fate for a statistical majority of ghetto youth, the equivalent of going to college for white suburban males.