Reddit reviews Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment

I'm honestly not familiar enough with the subreddit to offer substantive advice. You guys know I am no Language Cop, but from what I've seen there's a bit of this edglord strain of calling everything 'retarded' or whatever, and I think that, whatever one thinks about the offensiveness of the term, it's a bit politically silly. If someone comes to this subreddit who might otherwise be sympathetic to your message and is given excuses to discount you guys and not take you seriously, no one wins. I'm not suggesting you guys should call a Fatway against wrongspeakers, but it's worth keeping in mind.

As for pushing back against LWI, I think simply 1) talking a lot about how class influences everyone, every day, and 2) highlighting the real difference of opinion among members of marginalized groups, and how those differences are themselves often influenced by class.

Now, there's a bullshit way to do (2) and a real way to do (2). The bullshit way is to be like UHHHHHHH YOU REALIZE LOTS OF BLACK PEOPLE ARE REPUBLICANS, RIGHT??? I mean, a few! But a tiny few. Saying "Black people vote overwhelmingly Democratic" is a perfectly acceptable, non-essentializing statement.

But there are more specific examples that are quite powerful, and which get the point across nicely. One is black class dynamics and their relationship to overpolicing. A few year sago I wrote about a really good book that talks about this stuff:

>Michael Javen Fortner, a political scientist at City University of New York, is hoping to complicate the story that the Rockefeller laws, and others like them, were foisted on black people by white people. His book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, out September 28 from Harvard University Press, tells the story of Harlem’s struggles with drugs and crime from the 1940s through the passage of the Rockefeller laws. Key to this story is the role of Harlem’s residents in forcefully advocating for a tougher, more punitive approach to the neighborhood’s “pushers” and addicts.

This was a bit of a controversial book -- poke around and you'll find heated responses to it. But it's absolutely, completely, beyond a shadow of a doubt true that there were plenty of Harlemites calling for tough on crime approaches. Does that mean that white supremacy, usually pegged as the culprit in the institution of these laws, had no influence? Of course not. It can be both. And I actually reject the idea that Fortner's book and Michelle Alexander's (which he portrays his as a response to, if memory serves) are totally at odds. It could be that the Rockefeller Laws were politically overdetermined: Maybe, if the black community was united in its opposition, the laws would have still passed, but later on, or would have been weakened, or whatever.

But the point is that of COURSE black people don't like crime, and of COURSE when they live in a neighborhood with a lot of crime, many of them do the human thing: Get mad and seek to punish the perpetrators. And in Harlem and elsewhere, this often takes place along explicitly class-related lines. Middle-class Harlemites wanted to keep their kids and their homes safe from the ravages of heroin, so they blamed it on poor users and dealers. That's how human works! Color plays a huge role in a lot of stuff, but class matters, too.

Another great example, but DC- rather than NYC-focused, is Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr. of Yale Law School. Somewhat similar storyline, and it offers reality-based counterpoints to platitudes about how diversity (which is important!) magically causes certain problems to go away. Diversifying the DC police department did NOT solve the problems many LWI types would like to think it would.

Anyway, this is already getting longwinded but I guess my point is, if you claim to care about African-American life (for example), and that level of care extends only to your Twitter feed and to a few high-profile exemplars whose politics might not be represented in the communtiy at large, do you really care about African-American life? That's the sort of argument I would make to comrades who essentialize. Ask them to read these sorts of books and what they think of them.