Reddit reviews The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

You are completely missing the point. I don’t even know where to start addressing this. It’s not just about people killed by police, they are protesting an entire system that punishes certain races more harshly than others. They are protesting a justice system that favors the rich. They are protesting the existence of for profit prisons that make money off throwing people in jail.

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr_racial_disparities_aclu_submission_0.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/09/you-really-can-get-pulled-over-for-driving-while-black-federal-statistics-show/?utm_term=.3a50f9924266

Here’s a link to a whole book on the subject https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=nodl_

And if books aren’t your thing there is a documentary called 13th on Netflix.

> people get thrown in jail for unpaid fines/fees and other minor violations in 13 states,

So is this a space where we can discuss the excellent book The New Jim Crow because it seems highly relevant.

I don't take issue with the statement that the media has an influence. I take issue with that being used as a way to diminish the real grievances that likely sparked the unrest.

Yes there are instances that turn out not to be ideal (with less than sympathetic victims, but that's been happening since Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin) and there is the question of why white people have to have their property destroyed to resolve larger societal issues for which they are not directly culpable. But can't you apply the same logic to all the black people whose harassment and predetermined criminality at the hands of the police should not be dismissed out of hand because of the actions of a small handful of violent black people? I'm a big believer in fiat justitia ruat cealum, but I think the difference is that people are viewing Darren Wilson as a guy who deserves due process and others see him as a representative of the Ferguson Police Department. In reality he's both. He must be held to a higher standard as an institutional figure, but he's also entitled to have the facts of his particular incident evaluated fairly. Unfortunately, the notion of "fairness" comes from the the great beyond. He's getting his actions evaluated by a well-meaning (and almost exclusively white) accountability apparatus which is often very far disconnected from the experiences and root living conditions of black Americans. That's another big crux of the issue. It's justice being determined by people who sincerely believe they are neutral, but who unfortunately view the scenario through the spectrum of their own whiteness and skepticism of the idea of inappropriate or violent behavior from a cop. I wonder what would happen if the grand jury was all black and from Ferguson. Why are they likely to be any less partial than some white people who have also almost certainly seen some of the international news coverage? Again a question from the beyond, because they are not deciding what happens to someone who is supposed to be serving them. There is no structural accountability to the black people the cops are supposed to be serving the interests of, and black people do not have much collective political power to alter the white establishment save from mass civil unrest.

No I don't think that most white people are violent racists, or that they're even actively or consciously racist. The larger problem is blindness and willful ignorance. I think people see the disparities and don't see them at the same time. There is plenty in the public discourse about the ludicrous rates of arrests of blacks for offenses committed primarily by whites and how they fare much worse in every stage of the judicial process, but society rationalizes it. Is it because there are structural impediments suppressing black upward mobility or is it because they're lazy and need to have the moral fortitude to resist falling into rap music and the "thug" lifestyle? Interestingly, narratives similar to these have been going on since slavery and segregation. I think the white racism is definitely fueled by the right while the left sometimes makes facile arguments that don't get to the core of the problems. Yes I think there are cultural clashes that occur when two different cultures are next to each other that results in the dominant one using racism to justify fiendish or oppressive behavior. But the big fat zoom out issue is that it's used as a smoke screen to keep poor whites and blacks from organizing against the corporate state. I don't think Rush Limbaugh and those morons at Fox give a shit about black "thugs." I think they get white people so worked up about the negroes coming to take their job that they don't to pay attention to the crooks behind the curtain stealing all the money. Also, blacks tend to have very anti-authoritarian views such as checking the extensive power of the police and the expansion of social programs to resemble much of the western world. Notice how gleefully the left is in saying this issue has larger racial overtones, but they don't leap up and fix the militarized police force either or attempt to remedy larger societal problems that perpetuate these disasters either. They spout the same law and order crap as the Republicans, because it benefits them when they proliferate the same corporate state.

What is and isn't seemingly more important is hard to determine. That's another argument that's been around in every major social movement in US history. It wasn't time for blacks to have full citizenship because you know the economy, Vietnam blah blah blah. What is and isn't important is also largely determined by white people, but what I will say is that our democratic process should (but doesn't) serve the needs and alleviate the suffering of actual human beings instead of corporations and its own power. Black people are seriously suffering (as are many whites but not at the same rates as determined economically) and have very little political power (likely because of their widely held real left wing views) and this sometimes spills over into the revolt we're currently seeing in Ferguson. Is the question whether or not this doesn't seem so important, or just whether or not it happens to not be so important to white people?

EDIT: Cleared up a few thoughts and thanks for the gold!

EDIT 2: Grammar stuff

Hijacking the top comment to repost this:

To elaborate on how prison has replaced slavery as a means of racial control, here's an excerpt from a book called The New Jim Crow.

It's written by a legal scholar named Michelle Alexander, and it explains how mass incarceration in America has replaced slavery and the Jim Crow laws as a racial caste system.

> Mass incarceration in the United states has emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.
>
> This is, in brief, how the system works: The War on Drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage. The entrapment occurs in three distinct phases.
>
> The first stage is the roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash — through drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs — for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that were once considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate, and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get “consent.” Because there is no meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial biases are granted free rein. In fact, people are allowed to rely on race as a factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color are no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites) ‒ effectively guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are primarily black and brown.
>
> The conviction marks the beginning of the second phase: the period of formal control. Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not. Prosecutors are free to load up defendants with extra charges, and their decisions cannot be challenged for racial bias. Once convicted, due to the drug war’s harsh sentencing laws, drug offenders in the United States spend more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control — in jail or prison, on probation or parole — than drug offenders anywhere else in the world. While under formal control, virtually every aspect of one’s life is regulated and monitored by the system, and any form of resistance or disobedience is subject to swift sanction. This period of control may last a lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses, but the vast majority of those swept into the system are eventually released. They are transferred from their prison cells to a much larger, invisible cage.
>
> The final stage has been dubbed by some advocates as the period of invisible punishment. This term, first coined by Jeremy Travis, is meant to describe the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside the prison gates, a form of punishment that operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the traditional sentencing framework. These sanctions are imposed by operation of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often have a greater impact on one’s life course than the months and years one actually spends behind bars. These laws operate collectively to ensure that the vast majority of convicted offenders will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives ‒ denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.

The American criminal justice system is rigged against black people, black men in particular. It's a disgusting injustice, and nobody in mainstream society seems to really care. I'm glad Kanye is shining a light on it though.

Actually it goes way farther back then that! After slavery was abolished, the white people in charge (for a lack of a better phrase) realized they could not just do what they wanted to black people anymore. The solution to this, through the law, was arresting them for minor reasons and locking them up. This of course expanded over time and as you said, The Drug War became a great resource for continued oppression- intentional and unintentional.

The New Jim Crow does an incredible job of going over it. Whether or not you agree with her theories, it's an important viewpoint to familiarize yourself with.

>And your stats don't mean anything. They can be interpreted as meaning that blacks are more likely to commit crime in general, which the stats also show.

First, I appreciate that you're taking a different line of reasoning here. It's not easy to stand up against a multitude of people that see things differently than you. However, I think you're cherry picking statistics here.

You're right that statistically speaking, black people are more likely to commit violent crime - but if you don't follow up that statistic without asking yourself "why" then you're missing the crux of the issue.

For instance, did you know that white people are statistically more likely to abuse drugs than black people, but that black males are convicted at a rate 10 times higher than white males?

There's a long and complicated history as to why black people are inordinately prosecuted in our judicial system. But I strongly believe that if you look at the total numbers with an unbiased view you'll agree with me here. If you're interested in learning more on this topic, I strongly recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

If you're actually serious, this is an excellent read and a good starting point. Here is a free PDF copy. Here is another free PDF copy with links. One of the most incisive, accessible, and well-researched resources out there today.

It's this kind of thinking that fuels racism. There are too many people who think that Obama being elected as president was a sign of racism ending. This couldn't be further from the truth. Explicit racism is certainly on the decline but it has taken new forms that are more socially acceptable such as racially-motivated policing, constitutional rights being revoked from former convicts, and much more. There's a really great book called The New Jim Crow that details this way better than I can.

EDIT: THANK YOU for the gold! I'm not entirely sure what it does but I definitely appreciate it. Also, I think anyone who reads The New Jim Crow deserves gold in my book.

It’s also deliberate: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

>Indulge me in the systemic injustices of the black community from the last 40-50 years after the civil rights movement ?

There are entire books you can read about this. Here's one: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

​

And then the rest of your post is just taking your incorrect premise and running with it.

-blacks are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana despite roughly equal usage rates (https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers)

-the bureau of justice statistics found that blacks receive longer sentences for the same crimes even when other variables are accounted for (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fsd0512_sum.pdf)

-"African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account" (https://www.nytimes.com/.../study-supports-suspicion-that...)

-Black men nearly 3 times as likely to die from police use of force - http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/20/health/black-men-killed-by-police/index.html

If you want more information, here is a fantastic book on our systems of mass incarceration in the US called "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

> Colton said he didn't view it racially

Using racially charged terms and then saying, "No, I didn't mean it in a racist way," is the hallmark of racists (SEE: Donald Trump). No one self-identifies as a racist. They see their views as justified because they aren't against a particular race; they're against crime, poverty, drugs, etc. The main problem is, they overlook that behavior in the majority groups they belong to. White frat boys doing coke at a college party are just kids having fun, but black people doing crack in a poor neighborhood are violent criminals. Colton wouldn't have labeled a struggling white stand-up comedian as ghetto, so let's stop pretending like him calling Bill ghetto isn't racist.

tl;dr Colton is a racist.

EDIT: If anyone's interested in looking into this topic more, The New Jim Crow is a great book about how racism has evolved since the days of "Whites Only" water fountains and segregated schools.

Yeah, then go read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.

You and other activists who think throwing Asians under the bus is en vogue.

 

I just showed you a list of problems. Are you and other activists on the streets protesting anti-Asian violence from Blacks? Thank you. You listing what whites do to Blacks is precisely my point. It's whites who have a racial problem against everyone and that includes Asians so more focus on their misdeeds instead of pinning stuff on Asians as if Asians invented http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/
would help.

If you really want to know what's going on in America you should read the following books.

White Trash

The New Jim Crow

Read Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" and it's massive list of citations and statistical research, then tell me you still believe what you've posted is the reason we have a higher incarceration rate of blacks in general, but especially young, black males.

In fact, I'm so serious about you reading that book PM me, and I'll buy the book for you.

Aggravated assault is a felony charge. A number of studies have demonstrated that whites are more likely to be allowed to plead to a lesser charge, or to not be charged at all. The aggregate effect of the favorable treatment of whites is reflected in the arrest statistics. For example, see Racial Disparities in Pretrial Diversions.

For a more detailed treatment of this topic—and the "big picture"—I highly recommend reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

Edit: Here's [a BJA summary of the research](https://www.bja.gov/Publications/PleaBargainingResearchSummary.pdf "Research Summary: Plea and Charge Bargaining"), from 2011, that calls out the racial disparity in plea and charge bargaining.

>Slavery never ended, it just got swept under the rug. All the owners had to do was to criminalize being black.

Slavery never ended, it just got modernized to fit the social and political climate of its time. All the owners had to do was to criminalize being black.

I never said that was the case, and I'm not sure that I even see a point that you are making. What are the other things working against people? I agree, there are many factors, but you can't say something like that and not give any warrants for saying it.

My point was that, once you are in the system like that, the chances of getting out are low due to exactly what sinner13 said. I never said that was the only factor pre or post conviction; only that, post conviction, it is all but a foregone conclusion.

Check out the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It is a wonderful read on this subject as well as racial motivations of the drug war.

A pamphlet being distributed in the UK thinking through the intersectionality of gender justice / queer activism / prison abolition.

One of several articles on The Feminist Wire about prison abolition.

A talk by Angela Davis on prison abolition with an accompanying transcript. (You can also just look at pretty much the entirety of her work and the discussions that her work engenders.)

This book, The New Jim Crow, written by a black feminist and championed in many a feminist circle

The work of Dean Spade, a trans prison abolitionist who also happens to be a feminist.

Some really interesting discussions on detention and the prison system here.

I've also seen a lot more chatter about it also on my Facebook feed within the conversations that are springing up out of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases.

America has a huge problem with the criminal justice system and race.

Yeah but he's black. The US criminal justice system was literally made for black men.

Well, that's actually a pretty significant problem with the prison system, historically. I'm not just being glib, it's something historians of incarceration and African American history have been saying for a long time. Long story short, following the American Civil War, when slavery was abolished, many white Southerners still needed 'forced labor' simply because there were many jobs it wouldn't be economic to hire free labor for. Thus was born the "prison-industrial complex," where newly freed slaves would be incarcerated for things like "vagrancy" and had to do labor similar to that under slavery. Naturally, this led to many social problems similar to those found under the antebellum regime. Again, it's hard to get into off the cuff like this, but this book is a pretty solid introduction to the issues, IMO:

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465956818&sr=8-1&keywords=jim+crow+prison#reader_1595586431

"Someone who willfully commits a crime is not "impacted" the way the victims of criminal activity are "impacted." People who commit crime subject themselves to the criminal justice system. There is no conspiracy."

If you are genuinely interested in finding out why the above statement is, at the very least, not right, I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Centuries of systematic racism (slavery, Jim Crow Laws, the war on drugs) have specifically targeted communities of color. There are a countless number of studies that show that people of color don't commit crimes at any higher rates than white people, yet they are arrested significantly more often.

So, the problem with 'the box' is that someone is more likely to get arrested than their white peer for the same crime, are then labeled 'felon' and lose the ability to get a job, and then are often forced back into the same situation which led to them getting arrested and sent to prison in the first place.

Seriously, read the book. It's eye-opening.

The neighborhoods are not like that because of democrats, it's because of redlining. Literally just google "redlining" and there are plenty of resources to understand what this practice is.

Institutional racism does exist. I don't give a shit what you say. Your parents are wrong, your friends and parents that believe this are also wrong too.

This is a good book to read, it will explain that yes, institutional racism does exist. it will hopefully open your mind up. Get it from the library - https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

I'm not trying to incite a reddit riot but the idea of Racism = Prejudice + Power definition is pretty standard in sociology/anthropology, and was popularized in part by the insanely popular and well-reviewed book The New Jim Crow. Saying it is "Tumblr-esque" is an extremely nuanced and uneducated view.

People of color, particularly men of color, born in 1970 or later have not been welcomed into society as passively as you claim. Beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through to today in some areas, Americans of color have been consciously and unconsciously targeted by discriminatory and institutionalized practices and policies that restrict one's access into mainstream society. Collectively, these practices are generally referred to as mass incarceration, though politicians have tended to sell them as a War on Drugs that is Tough on Crime.

American-style mass incarceration is quite evidently discriminatory against people of color because the War on Drugs neither reducies drug use in the nation nor reduces crime in troubled areas. In fact, it has tended to increase both. Allow me to explain.

Since the late 1980s the American prison population has boomed from about 300,000 to about 2 million. This is the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Almost all of the prisoners in America are African-Americans, as high as 80% in some areas, and they were mostly convicted of minor non violent drug offenses. This makes no sense when you consider that Americans of all races consume illegal drugs and participate in the illegal drug market at approximately the same rate (Source).

Most of these non-violent prisoners of color, admittedly, spend only a short period of time in jail. However, once released almost all of them are branded felons because American laws offer little leniency on this account for persons convicted of drug offenses involving drugs that are frequently found in poor, African-American populated areas. Once labeled a felon, a released non-violent offender who has supposedly paid their debt to society sees little opportunity for a stable life because career, housing, educational, and social opportunities are severely restricted. Ask anyone who has been labeled a felon in America and they will tell you that given such a status is like being branded with a mark of the beast that essentially establishes one as part of an often ignored and almost invisible undercaste.

The lack of opportunity for this undercaste often leads to two things. First, many of the undercaste turn to drug use as way to deal with their emotional depression onset by a perpetual and inescapable state of impoverishment. Second, many of the same group turn to crime to make money because other opportunities never present themselves. They might be seen as having the "ghetto mentality" that other users spoke of. Hopefully you can see at this point how a deleterious cycle builds. Such a cycle benefits no one and also costs an incredible amount of money to maintain.

This is obviously a simplified account of mass incarceration (this is Reddit after all). Nonetheless, I hope it illustrated how opportunity is restricted in America for a large portion of the population. The mass incarceration system is "hidden" from us because there are no federal, state, or local laws in the US that explicitly target people of color so I don't think your comment is the result of a lack of intelligence on your part. Rather, the plain and simple fact that you live as part of an inherently flawed American society and culture stands behind your antiquated viewpoint. I hope you try to learn more about this so you can help fix the county that I, for one, love so much.

Further reading: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

Upvoted because of my love of Freakonomics. Another interesting book about this topic is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

If you're not outraged by our "justice" system yet, I recommend this NYT best seller.

The things the "war on drugs" has done to our society are atrocious.

Whew, okay. Pulled out my actual computer to answer this.
So, a lot of what I could recommend isn't short stuff you could read in an afternoon because 1. it's depressing as fuck, and 2. it's likely heavy with the sheer volume of references wherein at least one book attempts to bludgeon you with the facts that "this was depressing as fuck." Frequent breaks or alternating history-related books with fiction/poetry/other topics is rather recommended from my experience. Can't remember if I got onto this topic through Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or just some random book found in the library.

The very clean cut, textbook Wikipedia definition of "sundown town", aka "Don't let the sun set (down) on you here.", (Ref: BlackThen.com), is:
> sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.

For my intro into the subject however, read Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. This is a very emotionally draining, mentally exhausting book though, frequently with lists of atrocities in paragraph form. I think it's an important read, one which frankly should've been covered my senior year of highschool or so, but it's a difficult one. Also on my reading list is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration which is a surprising and sneakily hopeful title for such a depressing topic, so only guessing the narration may be somewhat more accessible.

Also, 'cause I totally didn't run to my kindle app to list out titles before fully reading your post, here's some below, and relisted one above, by timeline placement, best as can be figured. These might not be the best on each topic, but they're the ones available to my budget at the time and some are still on my reading list.

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

• Timeline 1831
  
  Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
  
• Timeline post-Civil War in 1865 through the 1920's, with thousands of towns still containing obvious racial divides (see "wrong side of the tracks", etc) and sometimes still utilizing laws to push black folks out of neighborhoods today.
  
  The Mis-Education of the Negro
  
• 1933, please see the book later down the list "Brainwashed"
  
  At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
  
• 1944 through the 1970's
  
  Assata
  
• 1960's through 1970's, about Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard)
  
  Revolutionary Suicide
  
• 1940's through late 1980's, about Huey P. Newton, Black Panther co-founder.
  
  Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
  
• 1980's through ?
  
  Sister Outsider
  
• 1980's essays on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class
  
  See also:
  
  Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival
  
  Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
  
• "A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders."
  
  Black Feminist Thought
  
• Supposedly there's a correct and incorrect version of this with severely cut or modified chapters, but not sure which is which.
  
  Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations by Bell Hooks
  
• Contemporary essays
  
  Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
  
• from slavery through today, how black people have been taught they're inferior to the point they help drag themselves and each other down
  
  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
  
• Supposed to be really good, haven't read this yet.
  
  
  
  
  

Unironically?

Have you read anything by Michelle Alexander?

Here ya go: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=new+jim+crow&qid=1550175272&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Try not to use words you don't know the meaning of. It makes you sound like a moron.

The term "racist" can be very loaded and charged, because some people (especially white people) view the label with such fear and dread that they will vigorously defend themselves against any hint of an accusation of being racist. The defensiveness masks for them the systemic racism within the culture into which they were born.

It's not always as simple as saying "X person is a racist" or "Y person is not a racist". There aren't just two options. Outside of people like white nationalists, who are overt and admitted racists (and who Trump regards as "fine people"), for everyone else, the label of "racist" is given out by others, and when it is, people usually run from it as fast as they can.

The reason I like to use it only sparingly when directed at an individual is not because it isn't true that the person being accused isn't a racist, but because the label halts any possibility of either person shifting from their position. A person labelled a racist becomes blind to even their own actual views on race, and blind to the larger existing cultural problems involving race.

Trump supporters will often respond to accusations of Trump being labelled a racist much in the same way as if they themselves were being accused, so we encounter the same problem.

If you really want to know the ways in which Trump is racist, you can just Google it, read about it on Wikipedia, or read one or two of the numerous, well-documented, thoroughly researched articles on the topic.

What I recommend instead is that, if you genuinely want to understand race in America, these three books are a pretty great place to start:

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This was one of those books that I had to pick up and put down many times because of the internal rage it caused. The drug war and mass incarceration are among the biggest issues we have in the US, and we need to find a way to change the way we think about it as a society.

Pretty sick of people making false equivalences. Let's be objective here.

The West created an entire fake science to justify centuries of exploitation of "lesser races" that greatly influences modern day ethnic abuse http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

Then, one tasteless ad or starring or refusal to give a high five = Chinese are soo racist.

 

It's a false equivalence. It's a farce and only spread to demonize Chinese people. Another example. China builds infrastructure in Africa = colonialism/neoimperialism. It's preposterous especially since these labels come from the most exploitative group of all. I don't need to name them do I?

Check out The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, she discusses mass incarceration in relation to the war on drugs and it's relation to institutional racism. I don't know enough on the topic to answer your question but she covers it in detail.

Here's some reading for you.

And ignoring the oversimplified and outright false accusation that "so many black men abandon their children", what else is wrong? You learn how to be a father from your father. And if your father didn't have the opportunity to learn from his father because they were property? Well, there's another difficulty, isn't there? And it's a difficulty that's not going to go away in one generation in the best of circumstances.

And why is it so far away from being "the best of circumstances"? Well, you could read Slavery by Another Name and The New Jim Crow to see how slavery actually lasted well past its abolishment and how the for-profit prison complex is preventing black people from simply "working past it". It's really such a complicated, horrible web... It's too much for me to try to discuss in one post.

But put simply: No other enslaved group, not the Irish, not the Japanese, not any other group of people has faced the same level of obstruction while attempting to rise up to equality. And if you think that these issues aren't part of the cause rather than the result of crime and drug use and poverty which results in black fathers being taken from their families... well, you're wrong.

> Law makers making thing illegal because they know it'll effect minority's

Sure, check out this article which quotes Nixon's White House counsel:

> Nixon's White House counsel, John Ehrlichman, verified the intention of the War on Drugs in a 1995 interview with author Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The war on drugs and the politics of failure.

> "Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure," Ehrlichman confessed. "We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it."

The Nixon Presidency marked the beginning of the heavy criminalization of drug use. It is not a coincidence that Nixon's most famous contribution to our electoral history was the Southern strategy, designed to win Southern racists over to the Republican Party who were upset with Democratic support of the Civil Rights Movement. That's probably what Ehrlichmann meant about drugs being a "perfect issue for the Nixon White House."

I'm a little busy at work right now so won't address your other point here at the moment, but maybe someone else can find some good sources (there should be many) about police disproportionately interacting with minorities (leading to more arrests etc.). Stop and frisk would be a good example. Edit this article is as good a starting point as any for the various ways in which police disproportionately target minorities.

In general I think The New Jim Crow is an excellent account of many of these issues.

There is actually this really good book that came out recently called "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". It talks about how the U.S. Justice system has become this form of racial and social control. Felony charges take you out of the voting pool for life and limit you to what what types of jobs you can and can't get. It's very interesting to say the least.

There are serious and endemic issues facing African-Americans today. They are not fairly represented in politics, and people in the inner cities for several reasons have the deck heavily stacked against them. While it's true that through hard work some of them may get out of poverty, it's not at all comparable to the upward mobility of middle-class whites.

The reason the inner city is a crap place to live and grow up is due to several discriminatory policies, including redlining. Black neighborhoods were denied loans and insurance from banks through federal policy dating back to the 1930s. This had several effects. an important one being that black people couldn't get a mortgage in a white neighborhood, they were largely left in the urban core while post WWII whites moved to the suburbs.Since whites had much of the business capital, jobs began to leave the inner city and move out. Thus blacks were now living in a place with few jobs, and the remaining jobs were far away and difficult to access without a car. In sociology this is called a spatial mismatch.

Job discrimination is rampant and inhibits blacks from getting careers with promotion opportunities. A famous sociological study called "The Mark of a Criminal Record" (PDF) found a large racial disparity when confederates applied for jobs. In one set, both white and black individuals applied for jobs without stating a criminal record, in the other they stated they DID have a criminal record. The end result (p. 958) is that blacks without a criminal record get fewer callbacks than whites with a criminal record. In a more recent study it was found that people with "black-sounding" names had to send 50% more applications to get a callback than people with white-sounding names.

The criminal justice system is rife with racial discrimination:

>On average, blacks receive almost 10% longer sentences than comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. At least half this gap can be explained by initial charging choices, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Prosecutors are, ceteris paribus, almost twice as likely to file such charges against blacks.

Source

Mandatory minimum sentences tend to be for crimes that blacks commit more frequently than whites. In murder cases, whites that kill blacks serve shorter sentences than blacks who kill whites, and blacks are far more likely to get the death penalty.

There are far more things that could be addressed. Blacks are packed into gerrymandered districts that were originally meant to get blacks elected to legislative office. Now they are used to ensure that most districts have virtually no black constituency. It's part of why Democrats (a party almost universally supported by blacks) have gotten more votes in congressional elections yet still are a minority in the House.

There's the issue that blacks get less pre-K education and are chronically behind their white peers. The family and economic background that black student have matters a huge amount:

>Understanding the reasons why so many black and brown Americans enter adulthood with extremely weak skills and low educational attainments is central to figuring out how to change the future. Poverty and inadequate family resources are a key piece of the problem. One in four children of color lives in poverty. Two of three black children and one of three Hispanic children live in a single-parent family. The low resource levels available to support these children’s initial development means that most come to school not ready to learn.

>The low quality of the schools black and brown children attend is another critical piece of the problem. Children of color tend to be concentrated in low achieving, highly segregated schools.

Source

Simply put, if your parents have a bad education, they can't help you do assignments- or because they work long hours as a single parent, they're hardly around to supervise whether their children are doing academic work- or avoiding falling in with the wrong crowd. To add an anecdotal bit to this post, I was tutoring a minority kid in a school with a low local reputation. He was near tears because I wasn't able to help him finish his math homework- he couldn't do it at home because neither of his parents understood 5th grade math. Few middle-class whites have a similar problem.

Conclusion: The people at your school are mostly correct. While slavery is not a good metaphor, a hugely influential book on racism in mass incarceration has came out in 2010. It is called The New Jim Crow.

Colonialism is an appropriate term in some cases. Also, just because segregation policies and their ilk were ruled unconstitutional doesn't mean their effects don't exist here, in 2013. White flight, redlining, and spatial mismatch no longer play as much of a role in racial wealth disparity as they used to, but it's why blacks live in inner cities and whites usually aren't.

Hiring discrimination exists and there is huge amounts of research to show that it is serious. The fact that whites with a criminal record are more sought after than blacks with no criminal record whatsoever should point to a system that is rotten.

The American Dream idea that people can succeed through hard work is an idea. It is not policy, it is not a law. Are we going to fault the new generation of black teens and young adults for being in poverty, when several generations before were as well? Are we going to fault them for not getting a good-paying job, when they don't exist in their neighborhoods and they have to compete with whites on an unfair playing field?

This isn't to say that some whites aren't in the same bind. Nor is to say that all whites are racist or don't understand what privilege is. But the evidence is stark- African-Americans don't have things pretty good.

Can we please also remember that the Controlled Substance Act came about in an attempt to combat civil equality. So groups that benefit from inequality and racism are also at play here, which could very well mean everyone that benefits from the low wages in America.

Relevant read: The New Jim Crow

Read "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" by Michelle Alexander: http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1595586431.

It takes everything you think you know about the drug war and takes it to another level, all while making you rage.

That's not what I said. I didn't say that now is the worst time. I said that we've been collectively pretending there is NO racism, and now more people are realizing just how wrong that is. Just because it's better than it was in the 1890s doesn't mean we've solved the problem.

A lot of white people, especially since the 80s, were raised with the idea that being "colorblind" is the ideal, but are now starting to realize that doing so ignores the fact that black people live a different experience in this country than white people. Part of solving that problem is recognizing that basic fact, which requires "seeing color", and then coming up with solutions that take that into account. "Colorblind" solutions often just give discretion to those in power, which ends up reinforcing the racial disparities that are already written into our society. (Edit: I highly recommend The New Jim Crow, which examines this through the lens of our justice system)

(As a side note, I think there's a decent case that racism in the US reached its lowest point sometime 2-5 years ago, and has increased since then. It's definitely come to the surface more)

Here, friend.

I think it's naive to say the rich conspired in some form as an attack on the poor and middle class. However the fact is that the income gap between rich and poor is widening by nearly every metric. The rich are getting richer.

It's also extremely difficult for poor people to get by in America. Here's a good book describing the broken policies that make the cards stacked against the poor.

Tied into that is institutional racism. Minorities, especially blacks, are unfairly targeted by the war on drugs, incarcerated, then labeled a felon and stripped of their rights. The New Jim Crow describes the policies and reasons that the war on drugs is effectively enforcing racial caste in America.

It's important to gain a deeper understanding of these issues if they are to be solved. All of these issues are visible to us on a surface level, but without a deeper understanding it can seem that the rich are actively trying to bleed out the poor.

These issues are not so much an agenda as they are something that emerges from our collective behavior. For example, studies have shown that many of us who do not identify as racist still exhibit conscious and unconscious biases. Our biases affect our society. Cynicism and pointing fingers gets us nowhere. Change starts with ourselves and we are all responsible.

I haven't seen this doc yet (just added it to my list!), but it reminds me of an amazing book I just read called The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, about how the felony and incarceration system in the US limits the rights of african americans in a way similar to the Jim Crow segregation laws. I was skeptical of the scope of the problem at first, but the book was really convincing- I'd recommend it if you're interested in learning more about our prison system and how messed up it is.

I'm not so sure I agree with this analogy. It doesn't address the fact that the question is flawed in the first place. The problem with it is that assumes that black people don't also organize against the crime in their communities, which happens at so many levels. There are many, many people trying to make their communties better who speak out against crime, but the OP isn't bothering to see if any such action is happening. He might not be aware of all the black people trying to address violence, but the question assumes that black people don't do anything at all.

On another level, high crime rates are very much the result of systemic forces that have existed in our country for centuries, but going into that is going to make this comment turn into a book, and the book has already been written.

>Another claim made by BLM is that they are regularly targeted by police officers in an unfair manner. This can be attributed to the fact that blacks commit a highly disproportionate amount of crime.

So what you're saying is that it's okay for officers to treat all blacks poorly because blacks are more likely to be criminals? I hope you're able to see why that would be a problem.

I would also suggest reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. It doesn't shy away from the fact that a larger percentage of blacks than whites commit crimes in America. What it focuses on is the fact that the punishment for these crimes are usually unfairly more harsher for blacks than whites. It also brings up the fact that poorer blacks are more likely to be targeted than poorer whites despite having similar crime rates.

There is most certainly a problem, it's just not so much in the open as in other countries.

> Whites don't have the ability to put their pitfalls on racism. Whites are thought to automatically be advantaged compared to blacks simply because of their skin color, so not being accountable for their actions is bogus.

It seems like we aren't even talking about the same thing anymore. You have some kind of narrative that black people aren't taking responsibility for something and it's not fair because black people can blame their problems on racism. But that is not the question that you discuss at the top of the tin.

I am talking about whether the difference in outcomes between US black people and US white people on a population level can be blamed on racism. The fact is, not much distinguishes black people from white people in this country except for the legacy of slavery and racism. The entire meaning we attribute to "blackness," and why we compile statistics on whites and blacks but not blue eyed people vs brown eyed people or brown haired people vs black haired people, is a consequence of that history, and a legacy of racism. No amount of apologetics or attempts to shift blame can elide that history.

> Does that legacy of racism get to last forever? Does it get to supersede the consequence of our actions?

Again, either we are talking past each other here, or your reasoning is difficult for me to understand. The legacy of racism lasts as long as the legacy of racism lasts, and it's still going plain and simple. Slavery lasted 300 years, and Jim Crow lasted another 100 before the civil rights movement. Even if you think that racism is over now, you don't undo that all in ~50 years.

Then recently we've had decades of the harsh punishment and overincarceration of black men, redlining, toxic mortgage loans targeted disproportionately at racial minorities... A good summary of very recent acts of discrimination is here, and a great book on our racially unjust system of incarceration is here.

Just because we all want the legacy of racism to be over doesn't mean it is, or that people asserting the bald truth that it still exists are looking for excuses for the "consequences of our actions." If anything, it's the other way around. People seem determined to turn a blind eye to the consequences of our actions as a nation, and to whitewash our history towards that end.

> I'm not getting why we can ignore the actions.

I explicitly said at the top that we can't. People obviously and trivially bear personal responsibility for their actions. But nevertheless, the difference in population level outcomes is attributable to historical and present racism within the United States.

If anyone wants to learn more about Number 6, there'a good book called "The New Jim Crow" which goes into detail of some of the shadiness that was engaged in. Also, Cracked doesn't mention it but this era of time is where vagrancy laws came from.

> What new Jim Crow laws are you talking about?

Primarily mass incarceration, but also continued redlining, police brutality, etc. I recommend reading this book, it's amazing.


> What do you mean by “have this”?

Let them have their own film and simply be a guest in this space, e.g., not being a cop and dressing up as black panther.

> By letting black people “have this” does that mean no one can buy it on DVD? Or that they can’t buy the merchandise or listen to the music?

No and no (meaning you can do those things). It's mostly about respect. We should partake, not take.

The comparison to slavery is apt: The New Jim Crow goes into detail about how the drug war and spike in mass incarceration is being used not to keep dangerous criminals locked up but as for-profit social control, much like how vagrancy laws were used to lock up blacks and put them to work after slavery was abolished.

Yea I agree with you that he shouldn't so easily dismiss the non-violent incarceration rate that has been messing up the black family for decades. Also it's not just drug dealers that go to jail fyi. If you want more in-depth information on the incarceration problem in the US I suggest reading this book http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1595586431.

Now, as another red pill black guy I really had to have an open mind when watching this video because in the past O'Reilly has made one too many inflammatory and crude statements toward the black community, but after watching this video I do have to admit that he makes some very valid points about the community's deep-seeded issues.

However, I would have liked for him to back up his statements with some sources. I'm also sure his assessment of the problem and the solution is a lot more complicated than he tried to make it out to be. True, the disintegration of the black family and the high rate of children being born out of wedlock play huge rolls in the issues plaguing certain black communities, but there are also other micro and macro issues at play here that we really have to delve into to get the full picture - at least in my opinion.

racism=prejudice+power.

the justice system is also incredibly racist, see the "random" stop and frisk laws in NYC targetinging PoC 7x more than white people for just one example. Read this if you want more intellectual stimulation from someone who isn't drunk right now. Hell, I'll even find a PDF you can read for free right now if you actually want it.

It sounds like you need to do a lot of research on your own and have a lot to learn. It's not other people's job to teach you. However I would recommend this book The New Jim Crow. It also has an audiobook that I actually have and would be willing to upload if you wanted to listen to it. There were also certain practices like redlining which segregated neighborhoods, and the fact that the G.I bill which many veterans used after WWII to get homes and build capital was denied to African-American veterans. Also look up Stop and Frisk in NY. There's more to it you just have to be open to it. If you have any questions and you're seriously interested to learn please contact me. If you don't want to and just want to deny everything then please don't.

You'd be surprised that today, it's rare to be black in an all-white neighborhood. Even education today is more segregated than it was in 1968 (the height of the civil rights movement).

"White flight" has resulted in all-minority neighborhoods in America. This results in less funding for local schools, lower property values, and fewer businesses wanting to establish themselves in low-income, racially segregated areas. This means that even grocery stores that sell fresh fruits and vegetables don't want to be in a low-income, high-minority neighborhood, limiting their access to healthful foods. Instead, they rely on the local corner store that doesn't even primarily sell food.

There isn't just an unequal standard of living, but also unequal access to opportunity. Your network (from family to your college alumni) can be so important when you're trying to find a job, but if you couldn't afford to go to college and your family has always been working class, you're already set up to have unequal opportunities compared to the kid whose parents are lawyers or doctors. Even if you look in the news today, you'll see instances of discrimination by banks, hiring managers, and federal regulations.

If you're really serious about learning more about why it's more difficult to be Black in America today, I urge you to pick up a book. Here are some of my suggestions:

American Apartheid by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol

That’s what I’m saying. The laws don’t explicitly target Black people but they disproportionately affect Black people. It’s like what GOP strategist Lee Atwater said:

>Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Bonilla-Silva has discussed this in Racism Without Racists, terming it “color-blind racism.” And Bobo et al have called it “laissez-faire racism”. And, of course, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is popular as well on the topic. If you don’t want to read a book or article, Ava DuVernay’s Netflix film 13th is insightful too. Examples abound. Take a look at the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. They’re essentially the same drug, but the former is more likely to be found in Black communities and the latter is more likely to be found in white ones, but the former has much harsher penalties. Or look at sentencing for marijuana. Surveys show that white and Black people use and sell it at the same rate, but Black people are put in jail for marijuana offenses at a rate of 20 to 50 times more than white people. So I’d point to the example of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and broken-windows policing as ways that racism has evolved.

You've got that right. We can start by legalizing all recreational drugs.

This is simply not true. You should read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

I agree that many minorities were financially unstable and unable to get mortgages because of institutional disadvantages created by racism, like receiving poor education at segregated schools. That doesn't mean that financially unstable people receive mortgagees, even if they are unqualified because of reasons beyond their own control. The justice department started to enforce the CRA and fannie and freddie started to buy bad mortgages in the 90's, years after desegregation ended. The FHA offered zero downpayment loans in the early 2000's.

Their were racist institutional disadvantages facing minorities after desegregation, like [occupational licensing laws] (http://www.amazon.com/State-Against-Blacks-Walter-Williams/dp/0070703795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373341935&sr=1-1&keywords=the+state+against+blacks ) and more importantly, [the war on drugs] (http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373341862&sr=1-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow). These are some of the sources of inner city poverty. The solution is to end those disadvantages.

educate yourself

Maybe it shouldn’t be illegal? And the only reason it is, is so that laws can be selectively enforced on communities of color - specifically, black men - and serve as a surrogate race control measure in the absence of Jim Crow Laws?

Read a book.

Specifically, this one

You probably won't find someone to talk to you about feminism or BLM randomly in Starbucks, even in Harvard Square. Democracy center may be a good place, but I think the internet and books can be a pretty good source for to start with, so your in-person learning can be more meaningful for both you and the person who ends up taking the time to help you grow into it.


Feminism and BLM are both possible solutions to problems within society. Learning about the problems from the bottom up is a good way to have the necessary context to understand the movements.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is a must read. amazon link
Michelle also has a good bit of writing on the internet that is accessible.

Speaking of writers on the internet, the tireless journalism of Shaun King has had a real impact in bringing police injustice and BLM to the mainstream, so I think he is a good place to start, too. His Soul Snatchers series, particularly his most recent installment about the NYPD and Bronx DA's criminal conspiracy against Pedro Hernandez is a must read.

Feminism can be hard on the internet, too, because there are so many kinds/sects/schools of thought, but I think it's still a good place to start. I think a good launchpoint is from a context that is close to you, as a man. This guide to how feminism is relevant to men seems like a good starting point. From there, I think learning about feminism by reading articles from a feminist perspective might be a good approach. Academic analyses about feminism are boring and probably won't keep your interest. My favorite source as far as trans-inclusive, pro-gay, pro-safe space feminism is Autostraddle. Yes, it's heavy on queer lady content, but I think it's a good website with years and years and years of content so you can find things that interest you. The politics tab is probably a good place to start, as you can read about issues you may have already read about from mainstream sources, from a more casual and feminist lens.

Good luck.

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

I'm not sure what makes you think the FBI would care about you looking into racial studies.

There are countless resources that discuss race issues you can look into.

"Black people commit more crimes than white people" - False. See next point.

"they have longer prison sentences than white people" - True. Often black people are arrested and charged more than white people, they are also more likely to get longer sentences, this is related to racial profiling and prison industrial complex.

"They have more economic hardships than white people" - True, that's how racism works. Our society is built upon white supremacy, in the US especially while black people were slaves white people were largely in power so in a position to create the laws and economy to benefit them, when slavery ended black people were left with less than nothing then faced with situations like Jim Crow laws and Redlining as well as general discrimination preventing them from working and building generational wealth. Racism and poverty are inherently linked, and there is a significant racial wealth gap.

"They are genealogically inferior to other races" - False. Race is a social construct, not biological, but in the past science was used to try to justify racism and some of the scientific racism ideas persist today. Whiteness as we know it today is different to what it has been in the past, for example Jewish people, Irish people, and Italian people were once not considered white, some Middle Eastern people today like Persians consider themselves white but others disagree, and an Indian man was seen as white.

"they have lower IQ/brain capacities than white/Asian people" - False. See above re. scientific racism.

Racism isn't just racial bias or thinking your race is superior to others, it's racial bias within our society/culture - we're conditioned to think certain ways about certain races, there are systems in place and history that means some races have more social power or influence than others - a person doesn't have to be screaming the 'N' word to be racist and simply believing all people should be equal isn't enough when society ensures we're not all equal ("In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.” — Angela Davis).

You really need some RACE 101 resources, and to look into these issues yourself - as there is a lot to understand and race is complex, plus I don't know what you know or what you might need to know, also because I don't think I'm very good at explaining racism 101 stuff! Try these: Race, Are We So Different? or Race-The Power of an Illusion may help you, if you listen to podcasts try Seeing White – Scene on Radio, there are many great books like The New Jim Crow which will tackle some of the issues raised here. There are resources like various syllabuses that have been put together following recent issues with anti-black racism and police brutality in he US: Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism, Charleston Syllabus, and Ferguson Syllabus.

FYI : You cannot be 'a bit autistic', you're either Autistic or you're not.

​

​

If SES has historically been driven by race I feel that it is necessary to show that SES no longer continues to be driven by race, rather than the other way around.

However, we do have evidence that socio-economic status continues to be driven by race. Two popular works that are very well cited provide excellent examples of why this is true.

The first is Root Shock, which details the multi-generational impacts of disinvestment and community dis-location. I think it is fairly intuitive that if your grandparents are made poor you, yourself, are less likely to be rich. The real implications go beyond such simplified concepts as wealth. There are real, documented, health impacts that extend for multiple generations. When you look at historic inequities that drive current living conditions it becomes obvious that race continues to be a factor in SES.

The second is The New Jim Crow, when you look at the levels of mass incarceration of young black men and the impact of having a jail record on future job prospects I think that it is quite obvious that a new generation is being forced into an underclass. In addition to this felons are not allowed to vote in many US States, which adds another burden to civic participation.

Edit: Added links.

Why do you hate Black Lives Matter?

EDIT: For anyone that wants a better understanding of why BLM exists, I suggest you read The New Jim Crow

Good book on this exact thing: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

I'd be interested to hear Grey's thoughts on Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow. It doesn't real with false confessions, but it goes over bias in the justice system. My (cynical) opinion as to why juries exist as they do is that juries aren't formed to find truth, they are about social control and promoting the dominant mode of thought.

Preaching to the choir, man. You should check out Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow. https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Changed my perspective.

The New Jim Crow

Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action."

Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily Kos, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.

Both very sad and interesting documentary. There is a real problem with the american justice system. I can't believe the judge told to this man's face "I hear you, and I can see you have been rehabilitated. But I will not release you today, instead I'll sentence you to a 40 years sentence"

For those interested, the book "The New Jim Crow" is a great read and explains a lot of things about the american mass incarceration problem and how black people have been targeted : http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Regression: The right of former criminals. (also disproportionately targeting minorities for crimes)

This might take the form of "all 50 states doing this simultaneously" instead of "federally" but the results are the same. In the 20th century there have been many facets of the War On Drugs (WOD) and being Tough On Crime (TOC). The first big push happened under Nixon, then the second under Reagan.

When these two popular republicans were elected they consoled white working class voters that were put off by racial and economic issues. By saying you were "tough on crime" the presidents and almost every governor and state legislature was able to target minorities, or disaffected groups and make it look like they were doing something. These policies did little good, had disproportionate racial impact, and by that I mean they mostly targeted blacks for crimes that appeared equally among whites.

New ways people were hurt and rights turned back by being TOC:

1. Three strikes laws (more jail time for a third offense, even if you already paid society back for your previous offenses).
   
   
2. Mandatory Minimum Sentences (takes judge's authority away and punishes people more strictly than a reasonable person would deem appropriate).
   
   
3. The right of equal treatment for WOD or TOC offenses (see crack vs coke sentencing)
   
   
4. Mass incarceration in general (jail time for minor offenses, jail time for non-violent offenses, private prisons paying political donation money to politicians that promise to be TOC, race bating by politicians to get whites to vote TOC even if there is no more crime than before which was incredibly common).
   
   source: The New Jim Crow

I dare you to read this: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478788311&sr=8-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow

PM me your email address and I will literally send it to you.

De facto slavery of African Americans actually continued after the Civil War through other legalized means: http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/reviews/tales-show-how-slavery-lingered-after-civil-war-atlanta-journal-constitution/

I recommend reading Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow", which summarizes post-reconstruction-era slavery of blacks quite well in its introductory chapters.

Eh, while I appreciate your reasoned approach to the issue, I think you’re misrepresenting the severity of the issue of racial disparities in policing. I can’t recommend The New Jim Crow highly enough as a meticulously researched, data-packed analysis of the issue and its historical precedents.

The best book you could possibly read is a book called 'The New Jim Crow' by Michelle Alexander. It's about America's racist criminal justice system.

Good lord. Someone needs some Michelle Alexander in their life. (For context: she wrote The New Jim Crow and is one of the scholars featured in Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th. If you haven't seen her work, you need to.)

> The US is responsible for vast numbers of human rights reforms around the world as it usually puts some standards in place when doing trade deals with other countries/regional associations.


And the U.S. also operated the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison where the U.S. routinely tortured inmates and subjected them to humiliating acts of sexual abuse.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/30/world/meast/iraq-prison-abuse-scandal-fast-facts/index.html

The U.S. also operated (and still does operate) a series of underground interrogation sites (black sites) where we conduct "enhanced interrogations" that the U.S. Senate had even determined to be torture.

https://www.hrw.org/tag/senate-torture-report

The U.S., the "land of the free", has a higher percentage of its population constrained of their liberty (in jails/prisons) than any country in the entire world. The U.S. incarcerates its black population at a rate higher than South Africa during apartheid, the most openly racist regime in the modern era.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Despite the Geneva Convention banning the targeting of hospitals in war, the U.S. stormed the hospital in Fallujah in the first days of the Iraq war in 2004, and the assault on the hospital was even broadcast on the front page of the New York Times.



The U.S. runs Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. holds individuals under indefinite detention despite never formally accusing them of a crime, in violation of a host of global conventions on the rights of the accused.

I could keep going and do this all day.

Don't get me wrong; I was born, live, and work in the United States. I legitimately love it here, and think we've done some great things. At the same time, it's incredibly naive to claim that the U.S. is responsible for "vast numbers of human rights reforms around the world" through trade deals or whatever.

The reality is that the US, like most western nations at this stage, has a pretty brutal and horrifying history of rights abuses.

Its that exactly. I recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander for anyone interested in the topic.

You can start with books like this?

Must reads:

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385722702/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_B0KwDbBN2MT7W

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_50KwDb9M4ECGM

Don't know what you are specifically looking for, but I would venture into the area of sociology more if I was you since you are starting to see a pure financial/economic analysis of the world is incomplete:
Hottest book right now is Evicted:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0553447459/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Just won a Pulitzer.

More books focused on poverty and societal issues:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/054481195X/ref=tmm_pap_title_sr?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The New Jim Crow, more focused on racial inequality:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1595586431/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492095495&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=the+new+jim+crow&dpPl=1&dpID=51GxNVbFjCL&ref=plSrch




If you are looking for more historical stuff biographies are always good.

Actually, their ancestors DIDN'T start out in the same socio-economic situation as everybody else. In fact, there isn't even a standard starting point for anyone. Each continent had different natural resources, and those people who happened to be lucky enough to be born on continents with better and more plentiful resources became more prosperous. The only reason white people became the most prosperous race is because Europe had better natural resources than any other continent on Earth (though Asia was a close second). The book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond reveals the absurdity of racial meritocracy.

Also, legal rights mean nothing if those in power still want to keep you down. The book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander exposes how white politicians have used all sorts of creative and underhanded methods to keep black people uneducated and poor, despite the passage of apparent equal rights in the legal system.

Yes there is.

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Before Reagan's election, the US was seen soft on the Russians, weak from Vietnam, and overrun by liberalism and black people. Post-Reagan: we talked about nuking the Russians; invaded Grenada; garrisoned in Lebanon; bombed Libya; fed weapons to anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels; began a 30 year campaign of blocking tax increases; and started throwing black people in jail en-masse for drug possession.

Mad as Hell was a good read on this. I plan on reading The New Jim Crow, which also touches on the Nixon-Reagan "War on Drugs"

Fatherlessness is a product of mass incarceration, and mass incarceration has always been the end result of a deeply racist pursuit of justice (or control, if you're really cynical).

Okay, now hold your butt cause I'm gonna get hot. Is affirmative action a piddling government bandaid? Absolutely! It's a throwaway remedy to a racial group that's been locked out of every beneficial social program from the New Deal to the GI Bill to the housing subsidies of the 60s and 70s.

Redlining, loan denial, threats of violence, and questions of political expediency barricaded black Americans from the policies that literally created the middle class in the 20th century, and they have been relentlessly policed in their own communities for more than 60 years. That's the real elephant in the room in these conversations, but it's been there so long we've gotten used to treating it as another piece of furniture.

The New Jim Crow is a great book about mass incarceration if you want to take the time. (Wiki)

The Case for Reparations is a journalistic review of redlining, loan discrimination, and outright theft stretching back more than a hundred years and cascading through today. Unabashedly radical but imposingly well-researched, it at times speaks directly to the concept of fatherlessness and the idea that "the kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable."

The wiki article for African Americans and the G.I. Bill, is something I found illustrative as well. Good reference list too, particularly When Affirmative Action was White.

Dude there are thousands of studies out there. The way that the criminal justice system has targeted black people since the Civil War is hardly a controversial claim anymore. Check out The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Great primer on the subject if you need to get up to speed.

Heard good things about the book "The New Jim Crow"

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Amazon

The Pirate Bay

Louis CK addresses this question more concisely than I will be able to here. John Scalzi also explains it using exceedingly nerd-friendly language.

It sounds like you are pretty new to deeply thinking about issues of racism; I commend you for seeking to learn more, and recommend you start with some reading. Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? is a particularly accessible and informative introduction to issues of race and racism in the US. The New Jim Crow is also great, it thoroughly and clearly demonstrates the racism inherent in the current US criminal justice system, and is a great illustration of how contemporary racism is less about individual bigots and more about institutions that systematically oppress people of color.

Here is how I have found it helpful to think about issues of race and racism, as a White person: I think it is easiest to explain using a different form of privilege as an example – being able bodied. I am an able-bodied person, which means I experience the world a certain way. I don’t really notice if any of the doors I go through have a button to automatically open them, or if I have to go up a step to get into a store, or if there’s enough room between tables at a restaurant I’m in for a wheelchair to navigate. I don’t have to notice those things as I go about my business – they aren’t relevant to my life, so why would I? I am operating in a world that was built by people like me for people like me, which means it is very easy for me to live my life in it. But for someone in a wheelchair, all those doors and steps and aisles I blithely walk through actually do present a big problem to their ability to live life as they want. That doesn’t mean it’s my fault, or the fault of other able-bodied people, every time a building doesn’t have a handicapped accessible entrance. For the most part we didn’t build this world, we inherited it. But it does mean that when someone, or a lot of someones, who are differently abled than I am raise an issue as a problem for them, I have a responsibility to listen to them, and trust that they know their own lives and experiences better than I do.

In many ways, being white in America is like being able-bodied. The systems I operate in were designed by people like me, and the majority of them are still run by people like me. It would be really easy for me to live my life oblivious to the fact that people who look different than me have a very different experience of America than I do. The only reason I know that’s not the case is because I’ve spent years working with and becoming friends with and caring about people who don’t share my race and class (I work in public education in a large urban school district). I see my male students get stopped and frisked for no reason other than they are Latino males. I see them get followed around by suspicious security personnel when I take them on field trips to public places, in a way that I have never in my life been followed. I’ve seen my Black colleagues have to present ID or additional proof to gain admittance to places that I don’t (most recent example would be when checking into a hotel for a conference, I just had to give my name, my colleague had to present ID). The list goes on. Any one of these things in isolation would be easy to brush off, but the fact that they happen over and over and over again makes it impossible to pretend it’s a racially neutral coincidence. And I know I am only seeing a small glimpse of the picture, because at the end of the day I’m still not experiencing any of this directly, I’m only witnessing it – and I’m sure there are plenty of times when I don’t even notice because it is so routine.

The fact that we live in a systematically racist country is hard to accept, because we all want to believe that we are in sole control of our own destinies – I worked hard to be successful, therefore anyone who struggles must not be working hard enough, right? If I still just interacted with my own family and the people I went to school with – people who, like me, are all white, middle class, college educated, straight, and able bodied – I’m sure I would think that way too. But the more time I spend with people outside of my own demographics, the more impossible it becomes to pretend my naïve version of reality is all there is. Again, that doesn’t mean institutional racism is my fault, it just means that I have a responsibility to learn from people who are different than me and from their experiences, and to do what I can to make it better – hence my choice to work in public education, which is possibly the least lucrative option I could have chosen after graduating MIT. But I love my work and feel lucky that I get to do it, because I believe it brings us one step closer to an America that lives up to its promise of equality for all citizens, and I can’t imagine anything more worthwhile.

You are basing your argument from your conclusion. Let's take this in order.

> You can create hypothetical future scenarios as much as you'd like (ignoring the reality of alcohol and crime) but it is fantasy.

Advocating for policy changes that are sensible and match what other civilized countries are doing is not a fantasy. Calling it such shows your inherent contempt for change, for whatever reason.

> Drug users have a huge economic need and maintaining a drug habit with a work schedule is next to impossible. Often drug users must resort to criminal means to supply very expensive drugs on a reoccurring basis.

Perhaps you've been victimized by a drug user. I am sorry if that is the case. But the crime of theft, robbery, or worse, is separate from the crime of drug possession, purchase, and use. Those truly are without a 3rd party victim in the way theft and robbery are not. Although you will not believe it, I promise you that the majority of drug users are not criminals apart from their drug use and are not addicts either. You are conflating addiction with use, a common mistake. Here's a start on that

> Often dealers are allured to the money but get attracted to the drugs. They begin to use also. Suddenly you're carrying a gun to 'protect yourself from others', which is often sold behind doors. Now you have a powerful, drug addicted, fearful person with a gun watching their back. No wonder so many lives are lost in the fight for revenge or money.

Again, these crimes are separate crimes. That drug sales and use led to them is obviously a problem with drugs, but if drugs were sold in Wal-mart next to the beer and wine, there might be a different story. If drug addiction was treated like alcoholism, there might be less crime, less criminals, and less economic waste.

Your explanation for the downward spiral that accompanies drug use is not untrue, but your characterization of a "culture" is racial and not cultural. I do not see the above arguments suggesting that changing the laws will fix everything, merely that changing the law is an important first step.

> he US has the highest incarceration rate in the world just because a single culture won't accept that the laws that exist today apply to them. You started off your argument that if we changed the laws all of the crime would stop. These same laws have applied to other races, many very poor, and only one group hasn't changed.

White drug users outnumber or equal black drug users in almost every drug category. Yet incarceration rates are heavily shifted towards blacks because if unequal policing, unequal charging, and unequal sentencing. These are accepted truths of TODAY. You don't need to take my word for it..

Your view is clearly inherently biased against one race and based on false suppositions about the facts and speculations about cultures you cannot know about. Hispanic communities have suffered the same downward spiral as black communities, perhaps just not in the neighborhoods you've seen.

Serious question: you complain to a friend about the weather being 110 degrees, and your friend says "that's nothing: it's 130 in the Persian Gulf right now." Be honest, your response is a) "wow man, thanks for that perspective. Really changes how I feel about going outside today." Or b) "how the hell does it being 130 degrees in Bahrain make 110 degrees any more comfortable for me right now?"

So it was bad for Black people in the 50's and 60's. White people need to stop saying that.

A problem that's fairly new is everyone can see how everyone else lives now. The data is in: systemic racism is not a debatable point.

When young disenfranchised Black people reach out to young disenfranchised White people only to have young disenfranchised White people lash out with inanities about the 60's, it makes all of us less safe.

Yes, things have gotten worse for young white people since the 60's. Things have gotten better for young Black people since the 60's. Black people are still fighting for things White people don't even have think about.

Y'all know there's been civil rights books written for our day since MLK, right? Read some Eric Lamont Hill or some Michelle Alexander for chrissake.

Most importantly, White people turning a blind eye to systemic racism (or worse, punching downwards) ensures two things: that the people in power stay in power, and that violence will happen.

It is a fundamental strategic reality that if you kill Martin Luther King Junior, you will get Malcolm X. People will be heard one way or another.

A reference to this, I assume.

(Coincidentally, I have a copy I got for free in a criminal procedure class, but have yet to get around to reading it.)

Not bullshit. Read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander for more info.

Yep.

But that's from so long ago.


You're right but still after MLK's days.

But that's not a reputable source, it's only hearsay.


Damn, got me there guess I only have hearsay sources.
But that's not real racism you start to type that's only against illegal immigrants and Jews.


Oh well, guess I don't have any statistics.
But those are the outliers...


Guess I'm all out of links.

/u/NeoDestiny If you're interested in a book discussing the justice system's unintended consequences on black youth I strongly recommend The New Jim Crow.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458154494&sr=1-1&keywords=jim+crow+law

This is a poor format to have this discussion.

There is a great deal of research into this subject that will be difficult to summarize in a Reddit comment but I will try.

The first is that most schools are funded by local property taxes if you live in a poor area your schools get less funding then the rich areas.

The second is that Drug Laws are disproportionately enforced in poor areas leading to ridiculous incarceration rates. And even after you get out we put a lot of effort into making it almost impossible to reform yourself after you get a criminal record. Almost all crime can be traced back to poverty related issues.

Poor areas are used for tax generation through the Justice system in many areas leading to breakdowns in trust between the police and the community. This also helps feed in to the poor get poorer cycle.

I am not going to bother listing all the evil shit we did before the civil rights era that resulted in most black people being poor in the 70s.

This is all fairly thoroughly documented and researched. If you want me to look up sources/documentaries on these please ask and I can find them for you.

I would recommend this as a good starting point if you are curious.

TLDR: In the past it was public policy to make black people as poor as possible, and In our current system if you get poor you tend to stay poor even if the originating factors are removed.

You really need to read some history and educate yourself on the realities of militarized policing and the treatment of black Americans.

Here are some suggestions where you can get started:

https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americas/dp/1610394577

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=37DDCSH6HQ7WTMAV25ZF

Silly me, I'm such a peasant with my [conspiracy theories] (https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/). You are lord god almighty with your masters degree, what do I know and what does [Michelle Alexander know about HRC's racism] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Jim-Crow-Michelle-Alexander/dp/1595586431)? This is obviously a conspiracy theory funded by Karl Rove!

ah, you're looking for the statistics. i can oblige.

>Do you not see how the welfare system correlates at all?

nobody sees how the welfare system correlates at all. it's a non sequitur with no argumentation actually presented, going on about lyndon b johnson, when it's clear the problems are actually a) much more difficult and complicated than nthat, and b) much less to do with lyndon b johsnon.

but i digress.

• http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/NYPD-Officers-Arrest-Quota-Exclusive-Interview-Pressure-Numbers-374077091.html
  
• http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer
  
• http://www.vox.com/2016/7/8/12128858/police-racism-officers-admit
  
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/i-was-a-st-louis-cop-my-peers-were-racist-and-violent-and-theres-only-one-fix/
  
• http://theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264
  
  >“These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration of nonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the black rage hillsame rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses.”
  
  of course, the education system and the structures of capitalism are all parts of the problem. they are simply one element of a racist system. the police and justice system form another, extremely important part. i don't see what this has to do with a "welfare system" from lyndon b johnson being the problem, i don't see why you can't figure out that your "sigh, if only black people would listen to me" story doesn't make you sound like a fucking dickhead. but let's move on.
  
  
  
• Black-on-Black homicides have decreased by 67% in 20 years, a sharper rate of decrease than white on white homicide.
  
• According to FBI statistics 7361 Blacks were killed by fellow African-Americans in 1991. In 2011, it dropped dramatically to 2447 African-Americans.
  
• Among Black youth, rates of robbery and serious property offenses are the lowest in more than 40 years.
  
• Five times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites.
  
• Controlling for other factors, including severity of the offense and prior criminal history, white men aged 18-29 were 38% less likely to be sentenced to prison than their Black male peers.
  
• African Americans were two times as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.
  
  source: http://www.demos.org/blog/7/29/13/myth-black-black-crime-epidemic
  
  why is this relevant? it shows the black crime rate is decreasing. if the black crime rate was the primary factor in why police target and kill black people, we should expect that the rate of police killings of black people should decrease too. and yet, they aren't.
  
  here's also a key link.
  
  institutional/systemic racism is not magically confined to one area or one cause or one system. but that doesn't chagne the fact that cops killing people is the problem, and as mapping police violence proves, is uncorrelated with black crime, or violent crime in general.
  
  perhaps you should read The New Jim Crow so you can actually understand the issue before you start talking bullshit. to be honest, your argument is so unclear that it's hard to argue directly against what you're presenting, instead of arguing at what you seem to be supporting.

If you really want to have an understanding of this topic, I think you should read this book. It explains everything in painstaking, referenced detail that I don't have nearly enough the time or patience for.

The situation you presented is clearly a catch-22 though. If these things are felonies what reason would a person have to seek help when they could be easily locked away for doing so?

I understand your burden argument. But you must know it costs, on average, 44k/year to incarcerate a person. That seems, in my view, to be a far larger burden then forcing them to seek help and providing them with the basics to start their life. I am also in favor of a Basic Income for this reason, it is simply cheaper than the alternative.


I disagree with your point that legalization/decriminalization would increase use. In fact the study of Portugal proves that contention is incorrect. We could, in theory, still coercively get these people to mental health and social workers. Because sure locking them away solves the problem temporarily, but what happens when the get out with a record? They're not going to get a job that is for sure. I reccomend you read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.


This is in part why our recidivism rates are so high, you leave people with little other choice and prison in this country is obviously used to exact revenge not rehabilitate people.

The war on drugs was a success for what it was designed to do...

Watch This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gln1JwDUI64
Post here: http://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/comments/1nuku9/michelle_alexander_the_new_jim_crow_how_racism/

Book here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595586431/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0XSA0GSJPA96RPFRFNVS&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1630083502&pf_rd_i=507846

Here is the mobile version of your link

I've even meaning to read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and this conversation inspired me to finally order a copy.

The renaming of Bombay to Mumbai was the project of the Shiv Sena, a right wing Hindu nationalist party, aligned with BJP. Its rise in Maharashtra coincided with a whole wave of Hindu nationalist electoral victories, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid. The Babri Masjid mosque, a shrine to a fictional Islamic god, was destroyed because Hindus believed its presence near the supposed birthplace of Rama, another fictional god.

This kind of religious sectarianism is the worst poison that an infect a society. The renaming India's cities was done in this spirit. They were renamed as part of a show of religious chauvinism, to demonstrate the superiority of their religion over others. When criticized for this, many Indians will make the excuse, as you have done, that the names were used by British colonialism, and that they are just taking renaming the cities with names from their own culture.

Its quite easy to see through this lie. After all, if they had wanted to rename the cities to take back their culture from the British, why do it 50 years after the British left? When the Soviet Union fell, Russians took all of six months to vote call St Petersburg by its old name, rather than the 'Leningrad' imposed by the Soviet Union.

In India the city renaming came so much later, because it had nothing to do with taking the culture back from British colonialism. That is merely the excuse given for sectarian religious chauvinism. No country is going to live under the thumb of a foreign power for centuries, win its freedom, and then forget about the opression for half a century, and then decide "Oh yes, remember how oppressed we were by the British? Lets fix that by renaming the cities!" Wouldn't they have done that right away, like the Soviets? As we say here in America, its a load of hogwash, and you should know better.

As for your points about the status of blacks in America, you are terribly naive.

The situation of blacks in the US is that of a undercaste, whose social and economic status is systematically pushed downward wherever blacks interact with the government. During first 2/3 of the 20th century, blacks lived under what was called "Jim Crow" apartheid, with racial segregation strictly enforces with extreme police violence. Slowly this was defeated by the Civil Rights Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, who was partly inspired by Gandhi. Then the blacks were free, for a while.

Later, when Reagan came to power in the 80's, along with many conservative governors in the states and in the legislature, the systematic oppression of blacks was re-instated. This time, however, it was unofficial. Under Jim Crow, blacks were oppressed openly and legally. Now, it must be done surreptitiously, through the War on Drugs. Nowadays, American police systematically arrest blacks, and charge them with imaginary crimes, like possession of marijuana (possession of dried flowers), and once they are in court, they are convicted of 'felony' charges. Once a person has been labelled a felon, they can be discriminated against. A felon is barred from many kinds of jobs, from voting in elections, from obtaining certain trade licenses, from getting loans etc. The hand of courts always falls harder on blacks than whites, but since it is for supposed crimes, they make it look as if it wasn't racially motivated, when in fact it is. In this way, the white elites have kept the blacks trapped at the bottom of the social order.

You can read about this in books like Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Robert Perkinson's Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire

I would highly recommend reading “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander. I had to read it for one of my classes freshman year of college and it was extremely eye-opening! It’s also written in a way that’s easy to understand and like the author wants to help and teach us.

Also to add, since I'm no expert in this field, I would suggest further reading on this topic including:

• Anything by James Baldwin to get a holistic view of systemic racism in the Western context. His debate with William F. Buckley in 1965 is still one of the best explanations of race in America. Also highly recommend his seminal works, "The Fire Next Time" and "I Am Not Your Negro"
  
• "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Anything by him is a good intro to the subject and he's great at describing contemporary black American experiences in narrative form)
  
• "A Colony in A Nation" by Chris Hayes (concise, easy to read intro on the history of racism and policing from the perspective of someone who grew up in a middle class white suburb)
  
• "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander (history of mass incarceration over the past thirty plus years and how it disproportionately impacts black and brown Americans)
  
• "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson (first hand look at the brutality and inhumanity of much of the American carceral state and how the burden is most acutely borne by poor Americans and Americans of color)
  
• Additionally, with regards to the correlation between white racism and voting for Donald Trump, I would suggest reading the articles, "The Nationalist's Delusion" by Adam Serwer and "The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates that were both published last year in The Atlantic Magazine.

Yes, really.

The truth is there's simply no way to separate American law enforcement from its historical purpose of suppressing minorities and the poor.

Richard Nixon outright said, on tape, that the government needed to come up with a way to single out blacks without appearing racist and that the way was a war on drugs.

Same actually. I picked up this book yesterday and I'm excited to crack it open.

You'll be interested and disgusted by the content of the New Jim Crow

download it for free here

In the New Jim Crow (one of the most important books I have read in recent years, HIGHLY recommended), the author lays a great deal of the blame for the continuation and expansion of the war on drugs and the resultant bloated prison system and discriminatory criminal justice system at Bill Clinton's feet.

The short answer to "debunk the statistics" is that due to a wide range of factors, people of color are MUCH more likely to experience poverty and as such much more likely to resort to crime. (They also experience the effects of poverty differently, in part due to unequal policing practices.) The economic piece the biggest, but there's a lot going on, so like I said lots of great books on the subject if you're interested, Rothstein's is a good place to start. I would also recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_WrrTCbYVC8Y0Q

But I also want to reiterate that when people refer to something as a "social construct", we don't mean that it's completely fake and meaningless.

Money is a social construct--cash isn't something that we can find growing on a stalk and the fact that we value some metals and rocks over others is basically arbitrary--but it's still a real thing and someone's relative access to it can have huge consequences for their quality (and duration) of life. In the same way, while the modern conception of race was invented rather than discovered, it has real consequences for people. If you want to read more about that, I recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

What are your thoughts on the contents of this article?

Are you familiar with the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness? (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_4bTQCbKZPQ5ZK)

Here is a direct link to the book. Seriously, you should read this. It is one of the most accessible books on the subject, and it's not merely "white men are all evil." It is a summary of good, mainstream scholarship. You will only come out better for having read it.

Thank you for engaging in a discussion.

I want to emphasize that I am not excusing Stalin. In fact, in no way did I suggest something like that. All I wanted was for someone to be more weary about passing judgement.

However, I would disagree with you about our prisons. It is my opinion, and that of many other scholars, that it is designed specifically to subjugate poor and minority populations. Both in the word of the law and in its execution. I would refer you to The New Jim Crow for a very good primer on the subject.

There are legal scholars who disagree, but I think the evidence is overwhelming. Now, I am not a legal scholar, so take from that what you want.

And I am aware of Holodomor. I grew up around the Ukrainian community in Chicago. I know people who know personally about Stalin's attrocities. To clarify the comment, I meant post war Soviet Union did not have famines or extensive hungers. At the time of Stalin's death, virtually no one died of starvation. And another thing, he oversaw the largest economic growth ever. But when I say that, I'm not defending him, and it isn't even the point. I really want to emphasize that we need to be more critical of our own transgressions.

Also read a book about racism because it's clear your state's education system clearly fucked you - read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU, 4.5 stars over 3 thousand reviews. It was banned from US prisons from fear of causing riots. https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

>Historical context is irrelevant.

Says the guy who thinks the only racism is anti-white racism.

> Jim Crow has been gone longer than 95% of blacks have been alive.

Read this and let's discuss.

> This is a breakdown of the percentage of those on welfare by ethnicity. Now take a second and think about it. An easy stat to find, 72.4% of America is White verses 12.6% is Black. Are you starting to understand yet? There is an astronomically larger amount of white people than black people, and therefore by STATISTICS, it shows that a much, much smaller proportion (which is what is tested in statistics most frequently) of White Americans are on welfare than the Black American proportion. Even furthermore these actual data, show that, of the people on welfare the Black percentage is STILL HIGHER!!! Q.E.D. You are completely wrong. Period.

Thanks for the updated data. You are correct - my previous assertion was inaccurate. The link I included had old data, and since it, blacks have overtaken whites in their share of welfare claims.

And I do understand proportional statistics, thanks for that. My question to you is: Why do you care so much that they're black? Let me guess - it's not racist, it's just that, you know, blacks are like, lazy. Everyone knows that.

There have been some interesting books the past several years, including The New Jim Crow, which show some evidence that racial profiling has resulted in higher incarceration rates for minorities, which leads to higher percentages of single mothers, which leads to more welfare recipients proportionally. Food for thought...

> Typical White Girl.

You are so far off the mark it's not funny. But really, show this thread to one of your black friends and ask them what they think. What you said is in fact racist and presumptuous. Telling someone how to "fix" their issues. Unless you grow up black here, and especially black in the south or a large city, you won't understand how the cards are stacked against you. A black man in America has a higher chance of going to prison than going to college. The Federal government spends more on prisons than college, as do many states. Read the book below. It will give you a whole new appreciation for what the word "criminal" really means, who becomes one, and why- who goes to prison, and who doesn't.

Please read "The New Jim Crow". http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451709658&sr=8-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow

> 67% of all black children have single parents. Usually the state acts as a surrogate while the fathers are in jail.

And here is a very well researched book explaining why:

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

Institutionalized racism is still a huge problem. But it is not a failing of the victims, it is the fault of the oppressors.

Now, stop deflecting (if you're capable of that) and answer the question: how much "blackness" makes one more prone to violence?

Michelle Alexander, author of 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness' -
>If anyone doubts that the mainstream media fails to tell the truth about our political system (and its true winners and losers), the spectacle of large majorities of black folks supporting Hillary Clinton in the primary races ought to be proof enough. I can't believe Hillary would be coasting into the primaries with her current margin of black support if most people knew how much damage the Clintons have done - the millions of families that were destroyed the last time they were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes. There's so much more to say on this topic and it's a shame that more people aren't saying it. I think it's time we have that conversation.

If you really want to know, read "The New Jim Crow" it explains the phenomena rather eloquently.

I will look into Thomas Sowell. In fact, I will order one of his books right now. Which do you recommend?

Edit: Looking in him now. I find a lot of what he says to be rather "meh", but I'm going to give his book a shot. However, is he the only black scholar you read? We aren't monolithic and many well educated scholars would agree with many/some of his views.

In return, I ask that you look into "The New Jim Crow", which goes over a lot of what I've grazed upon, but from a much more eloquent and educated woman than myself.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

I'm not saying technology alone was to blame. I'm saying that what people seem to not understand is that when black communities were hit, it had a larger impact, because black communities were not on a level playing field. Racism, especially systematic and institutional racism, added an extra set of challenges that white americans never had to face. As a black american, I acknowledge there are some issues in my community. But I also understand how things got to be so bad and that we cannot expect the government to fix it, the same people who really helped fuck it up. Same thing with Native Americans. Things are bad, but they didn't just get bad for no reason. We really have to take a nuanced look at history.

I linked some great sources, you should consider having a look.

I also suggest maybe rethinking relying on Ann Coulter.

"If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream. It’s a personal fantasy of mine.”

• I don't have to explain why a woman who believes this is a problem. It's also simply not true. More white women voted republican, especially this year.
  
  “A lot of people are upset when I talk about Mexican child rapes, Muslims clitorectomies, Muslim honor killings…white people don’t do that. America is not used to these types of crimes. We are bringing in cultures where child rape is very common.” -
  
  male circumcision. Perhaps different reason, but child mutilation is wrong. Also, the catholic church? Lots of child rape.
  
  "In 1960 whites were 90% of the country. The census bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner. One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been.”
  
  
• Compassionate overlords?
  
  “This is a country created by white people…I am a Native because I am a descendant from settlers.”
  
  Correction, this country was stolen, then recreated by white people. Only natives are native americans.
  
  Basically, not to knock you, but this woman is part of the reason racial divides exists. I like to think we have a lot more in common than not, but rhetoric like Ann's unnecessarily furthers the divide. I'm sure there are much more reliable and less hateful conservative voices.
  
  
  
  
  

Hasn't been mentioned yet but extremely important book:

Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow

well without getting too in depth I'd like to first say you should look into and read up on the issue because I will undoubtedly get something wrong here. It's overwhelmingly complicated and I'm not an expert. If you want a quick easy intro you could start with netflix's 13TH. Many of the authors you should be reading if you're interested in the theory of structural racism are quoted or interviewed in that documentary.

 

The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander

Not in my Neighborhood - Antero Pietila (caveat: I read about redlining quite a few years ago now, from someone interviewed in 13th. forget who. would cite them instead but in a rush RN. I think I read a snippet of this book at one point but tbh it's been a long time since I went to school)

 

are both probably good places to start. I have a collection of academic journals and sources from undergrad I might be able to find at home too (although my life is busy this holiday season so no promises). the basic idea is that after the civil rights movement many things aligned to marginalize minorities in place of the more openly racist system of segregation. After WWII vets were given houses, but black vets were encouraged to move into new houses in black neighborhood, which were "redlined" - essentially the houses in black neighborhoods were deemed less valuable and if you lived in these neighborhoods it became progressively harder to get good loans and build your financial assets. so white vets sent their kids to free using the assets their GI bill houses gave their family, while black vets watched their neighborhoods slowly fall into poverty and marginalization.

 

Meanwhile a rhetoric of "criminality" was cultivated in politics - Nixon ran on an anti-crime platform and his adimistration allegedly used drugs and crime to split up hippies and black, keeping them from unifying politically. Reagan grew these policies and next thing you know The New Jim Crow emerged - sorry for wiki but incarceration skyrocketed and disproportionately hit minorities and the lower classes. Check the sources at the bottom of the wiki it's a much more complex issue than one sentence and I don't have time to cite you a million sources. Although democrats don't like to talk about it, Bill Clinton actually resided over a very large part of this trend of mass incarceration and even enacted some of the harshest laws - like three strikes and you're out and mandatory minimums. It's possible this hard stance on crime helped win back the presidency for the Democrats - by then crime had become such an integral part of campaigning that the only way to beat the republicans was to join them.

 

during this time you can actually also find some strong examples of more direct violence against major outspoken black voices - there was the time philadelphia bombed itself - here's an op-ed on that one too and there was the assasination of Fred Hampton while he was asleep next to his wife

 

complicating matters is the privatization of prisons. With so many people in prison states were slow and overcrowding became an issue so profits started to be had in the private prison sector. it didn't take long for other industries to join the party -Lots of big names in American consumerism use or used labor in prison camps to cut labor costs and stay local. Which just makes it more profitable to be tough on crime and run prisons.

 

tl;dr: it pays to have cheap labor and infrastructure/governement can be used to maintain the status quo with a new spin

I am not really sure what you're trying to say here. I completed my thesis on this topic and I encourage some of these readings:

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

In his 1968 run for President, Richard Nixon and fellow conservatives seized the tumultuous events at the time as an opportunity to gain political points--you are spot on.


Nixon dedicated seventeen speeches solely to the topic of law and order. The liberal Democratic establishment was characterized as out-of- touch and weak on crime. In one of his television ads Nixon called upon American voters to reject the lawlessness of civil rights activists and embrace “order.” At the end of the ad, a caption reads: “This time . . . vote like your whole world depended on it . . . NIXON.”

After viewing the campaign ad, Nixon remarked that the ad “hits right on the nose. It’s all about those damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”

Before Nixon’s inauguration—Krogh and Ehrlichman held strategy sessions with ranking members of the House Judiciary Committee. Their meetings were an attempt to test nationwide federalist crime policy in Washington DC, increasing preventative detention and no-knock raid provisions left out of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act passed six months earlier. The new administration held two strategy sessions on crime, just before Nixon took office, and another shortly after his inauguration. Nixon surrounded himself with some of the most notable conservative crime experts at the time. In addition to Krogh and Ehrlichman, were GOP chief House counsel John Dean, and future Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a domestic policy adviser.

Fast forward to the Texas Tower shooter and you have the creation of SWAT. Though SWAT’s original motives were to handle
extreme emergencies, their first official mission is indicative of what the State constitutes
as an emergency. In 1969, in its first mission, SWAT raided an alleged headquarters of
the Black Panther Party.

I could go on and on, but I'll leave you with one final article that I think you should take a look at: How White Users Made Heroin a Public-Health Problem and the 1985 Philidelphia MOVE Bombing. where police literally bombed--as in C4 explosive from a helicopter--a neighborhood because it was rumored to be home of black activists.

> but American "justice" confuses and terrifies me regularly.

American Criminal Law is basically about domination, conquest, ostracism, and systemic alienation by the "Master Race" just like almost all of our nation's history. At least the official history which tends to condone such behavior if not lionize it. "after all just look, the master race is still in charge and we still don't have to play by the rules." We've never had a "Magna Carta" moment in our history. The master race being rich white male landowning Europeans. If you weren't at least four of those, Americans don't care about your history if not outright hating and fearing you.

Read for example "Slavery by Another Name." by Douglas A. Blackmon (bit of an appropriate name) or "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander.

It's systematic abusive behavior written into the laws. It's basically the same kind of stuff that abusers do to their kids. The only reason why we're not a third world country like, say the Phillipines, is that we were the only major country not destroyed by both world wars, so all the scientists and technicians in europe moved over here in the early 20th century.

So, imagine an impoverished alcoholic who abuses his wife and kids, living in one of europes many slums in the 18th's century. Image he gets dissillusioned by his lack of any kind of career sucess (because he's an abusive drunk sociopath) Now, Imagine he decides to ship it over the pond to seek his fortune (partially because his wife and family all hate him.

These are America's founding fathers. Abusive nasty classless wife beating fucks. Seriously. These are the people who wrote out earliest legal system.

We're sentimental about our roots in Europe despite the fact that everyone hated our ancestors often for good reasons over there. We think this makes us awesome that we were willing to take this grand misadventure, when we didn't actually have a choice.

It wouldn't have happened if the actual americans hadn't been devastated by several pandemics introduced a century before.

You think you sound deep but it's really naive. I don't know what your past is but I can tell you don't know what it means to feel that kind of pain and have it thrown in your face. It's not some dead history and I hope some day you take some time to educate yourself there's a lot of great works out there to explain it.

& for the last time, assault is not okay, but don't instigate and expect not to get a reaction.

I have read 25 non fiction books this year. These are the best

The New Jim Crow Important and convincing, extremely well written - I don't think anyone could read this and not agree with her. 10/10

Unpatriotic History of the Second World War The title (and especially the publisher write-up) is kind of misleading I think. The book does lean left, but I think it just presents a pretty realistic warts and all picture of the war, with everyone out for themselves. I may have just enjoyed this book so much because my knowledge of the war was so cursory.
9.5/10

> It shouldn't be hard to find a link then to back your claim, sources please

I don't have time to walk you through all of this. I'm not a high school history teacher. That said, here are a couple of quick sources to illustrate the point that workers get screwed, government intervention can be a positive, and your fantasy of free negotiation is absurd: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4822a1.htm

http://www.history.com/topics/labor

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_westcoast.html (I'd recommend you read the actual case, as it's an example of lived experiences informing a legal decision to reduce freedom of contract).

If you want to know more I recommend picking up a real book, since it's difficult to get a comprehensive idea of what employment relationships have really been like just from webpages and snapshots of time. Some ideas:

http://www.amazon.com/A-Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0060838655

Or selected chapters from this book http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421953073&sr=8-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow&pebp=1421953075409&peasin=1595586431

Or you could even spend time on Google, since it's free.

> I found multiple countries, hardly scattered.

Except that none of those countries actually support your claim. When I said that you could find scattered examples, I was speaking hypothetically, because you haven't provided any, and "yeah but Sweden" isn't an argument, especially when: http://work.sweden.se/living-in-sweden/workers-rights-and-unions/

And again, you're saying that all government intervention should be abolished. You made the claim, now stop trying to pigeonhole the conversation into a discussion about the minimum wage.

Someone mentioned it below, and I second their suggestion. The New Jim Crow is a fascinating book that explains quite a lot, particularly regarding the War on Drugs (god I hate that name) and it's effects on the black community. I'm white and that book changed my entire perception of "black culture" and the culture of poverty.

Try The New Jim Crow.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374067596&sr=1-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1595586431

This is one of the most eye-opening books I've ever read, AND she uses research to back up a lot of her claims. Really worth the read. Though I did have to keep putting it down because I'd get too pissed off to read.

I would recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. A great read on some of the topics surrounding crime statistics and what we should glean from them. Not the main topic of the book of course.

Ok, for starters, the survey methodology is already questionable, as different cultures will have different levels of willingness to answer truthfully on a question like that.

Second, a survey on someone of a different race being your neighbor doesn't--at all--capture systemic or institutionalized racism. White people can say they love Black people until the cows come home, but as long as extreme state-sponsored racism still exists, the USA remains really fucking racist. (Full PDF of book here if you're interested)

> Why the US ? It's one of the most diverse and free countries in the world. Not a big fan of the government but there's a reason everyone wants to live there.

If I'm going to ring Israel up for defacto discrimination via social norms rather than obvious race based law, then I certainly have to accept that America also fits that definition. Some argue (and I'm amenable to the argument) that features of the current implementation of the American legal system amounts to modern "Jim Crow" laws. The popular book making this argument is Michelle Alexander's: The New Jim Crow. I assume you're not super familiar with American history, so just a quick summary of what I'm talking about:

1. Africans are brought to America during the slave trade. These people have no rights despite America proclaiming that "all men are created equal."
   
2. Though the American constitution doesn't use the word "slave" there is what's called the "3/5ths compromise" where the founders agreed that, when conducting the census, slaves would count as 3/5ths of a person. This is important because the American House of Representatives is based on population numbers and slave states wanted to get as many representatives as possible while non-slave states argued that slaves can't vote and have no rights, so why should they be part of the count that determines how many representatives a state gets in the legislative body.
   
3. After the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery, America got rid of the 3/5ths compromise and passed the 13th amendment ('Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.') Notice how that's written? What's the loophole?
   
4. "Jim Crow" laws start to spring up in the former slave states. These are laws specifically designed to disenfranchise black voters without directly specifying race. The law might be something like: you can only vote if your grandfather voted (being 'grandfathered in'). Newly freed slaves may not even know who their grandfather is (slaves were routinely separated from their family sometimes for simple economic reasons and other times as a purposeful tactic to keep familial strength down), and even if they did... their grandfather certainly never had the right to vote. At best, apartheid South Africa could have claimed to be in this phase.
   
5. A sort of equilibrium is found where the slave states essentially found ways to continue being slave states without violating the 13th. There was a system of "separate but equal" where slave states would claim that blacks have all of the same rights but have to remain segregated. This is the nearest historical comparison for where I think Israel is right now. In my opinion, you're in your "separate but equal" phase.
   
6. A lot of time passes, and black people slowly gain rights eventually culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which attempted to deal with the remnants of Jim Crow and the failed effort after the Civil War to integrate southern slave society with the rest of America (we basically put reunifying the country ahead of actually stamping out the core issue... 13th amendment was "good enough" even if it wasn't really respected in the south).
   
7. Remember that loophole? With Jim Crow being mostly defeated and black people beginning to vote and elect representatives again, then President Nixon implements the "southern strategy" which include "law and order" with the result being (some would argue) essentially a new Jim Crow system where you find reasons to arrest and charge your opponents (blacks and hippies in Nixon's eyes) and if you can pin a felony on them, then you can take away their right to vote. This is why American black people are so sensitive to the police issue, because they see it as, essentially, the continuation of an effort to disenfranchise them even if there isn't a law written that specifically targets them.
   
   Ok, so I'm basically arguing that, like I believe to be the case in Israel, in America we're trying to live up to our ideals, but we've historically fallen short and continue to do so based on deep seated human feelings about "us" and "them." We may say that all men are created equal and that justice is blind, but in both of our countries the data says our legal systems produce worse outcomes for minorities than can be accounted for through normal variables. I'm not sure that I'd say American or Israel are the most racist western countries, but I think it's fair to say that we're up there in terms of how out of place and hypocritical our racism is. America, because we're a country of immigrants ... and Israel for the same reason (don't flip out, it's just true by modern definitions) combined with the recent experience of what can be the result of extreme "us" vs "them" thinking with the Shoah. In other words, we're not the worst ... but we should be the most ashamed.
   
   > I still really like your argument and the way you put it. I can't bring myself to disagree with you anymore.. lol
   
   Thanks! It always feels good to hear you made a good argument. That said, I've found my arguments over the years only because people like you attack them and show me where the weaknesses/mistakes/inaccuracies are. I hope that you'll come at me in good faith, and we can continue to make each other smarter and more capable of articulating our respective positions.

Brilliant book, absolutely worth a read if any of y’all haven’t read it before: https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=nodl_

/u/psychicoctopusSP just told you about a book that is very short, easy to read, and might make you think about this differently.

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

The system definitely punishes blacks more than whites for the exact same crimes. If we are talking about drugs, assume the exact same situation. Same car, same container for drugs, same type of drugs, same quantity of drugs, same demeanor to the officer and in court, same everything. Different sentences. This is well documented at this point.

i think that today's political landscape provides people with different senses of reality. Many americans go through life seeing little discrimination, and see the opportunities everyone shares. the fact of the matter is that while there is certainly less systematic discrimination discrimination than there used to be, in actuality there are many systems that deeply discriminate. as an example, when you look at racial discrimination in regards to higher conviction rates for POC that have committed the same crimes as a white counter part, in addition to housing and employment discrimination. there are some good books and studies out there on these topics. just because people you may know aren't racist doesn't mean that the system isn't still isn't overall more discriminatory for certain groups. that's not to say that it doesn't swing the other way sometimes. I can recall a case where a large tech company had pressure on them to hire more diversely and it led to unfair hiring practices in favor of people of color. But those cases are much fewer compared to the discrimination faced, and overall are certainly still on the short end of the stick in regards to their opportunities in the US.

All of this is to say that if someones stance on an issue is to support those being being discriminated against and oppressed, and they hold political events, rallies, etc. then the "attack" they are making is against their oppressors. they are asking for equality. We can call this "punching up", because the oppressors are holding them down. So when a group with other views protests against their cause, they are siding with the status quo, maybe they don't think the racism is really playing a role in the outcome of their lives. ultimately they are siding with the oppressors. If they are actively trying to oppose their efforts, they are "punching down".

regardless of what race Joey Gibson is, there are three actions one can take in this situation. actively support the oppressed, take no action, or actively work against the cause of the oppressed. the fact of the matter is that Patriot Prayer has fallen into the last category in regards to race issues and anti-muslim issues. Sure, they also stand up for milquetoast right wing positions (and i certainly share an anti-gov sentiment with them), but they also actively work against the oppressed. i'm not trying to be snarky or anything, just my thoughts here.

...Talking points? I'm a sociologist who works on economics, politics & crime and has worked in several police & prison orgs.

I'd be glad to cite every claim I made--though I can't imagine how explaining the is/ought distinction is a 'talking point.'

Crack is not more addictive than free based or injected cocaine, this is a physiological fact. It is only more addictive than snorted cocaine. And, it is not 18-100X more addictive than snorted cocaine, so that isn't even a justification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elements_of_the_Philosophy_of_Right

http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~hlevine/Secret_of_World_Wide_Drug_Prohibition__HG_Levine

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/ssrn-id1118460.pdf

http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~ec970ajf/Class_19/economics_drug_war%20copy.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Oblivion-Global-History-Narcotics/dp/0393325458

https://www.amazon.com/Creating-American-Junkie-Addiction-Research/dp/0801867983

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/harvard-economist-jeffrey-miron-on-why-drugs-should-be-legalized-a-886289.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/?utm_term=.765f9157fdf3

http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-theft-protect/

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/news_detail.asp?newsID=35

http://www.countthecosts.org/sites/default/files/Crime-briefing.pdf

http://www.nber.org/papers/w6950

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2015/08/racial_disparities_in_the_criminal_justice_system_eight_charts_illustrating.html

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr_racial_disparities_aclu_submission_0.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Color-Justice-Ethnicity-Wadsworth-Contemporary/dp/1111346925

http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparity-in-State-Prisons.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20452518.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/who-are-biggest-killers-america-numbers-will-shock-you

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16702

http://hlrecord.org/2015/03/20-things-you-should-know-about-corporate-crime/

https://www.attn.com/stories/2643/crack-vs-cocaine

https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/

https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/family/item/21784-prescription-drugs-kill-more-than-illegal-drugs-teens-at-high-risk

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/29/george-will/claims-smoking-kills-more-people-annually-other-da/


edit:

more sources

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303032

http://news.stanford.edu/2016/06/28/stanford-researchers-develop-new-statistical-test-shows-racial-profiling-police-traffic-stops/

http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/how-much-crime-fighting-do-%E2%80%98crime-fighters%E2%80%99-really-do

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1458086.files/Western.pdf

http://64.6.252.14/class/540/2013/science-cullen.pdf

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/e199912.htm

https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Get-Richer-Poor-Prison/dp/0205137725

http://www.infoshop.org/pdfs/Our-Enemies-in-Blue.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Lockdown-America-Police-Prisons-Crisis/dp/1844672492

> Get rid of that shit, or use it when you suspect brigading. It's rankly insulting to label someone as a "donald user". I read and post there occasionally, and it's usually a dissenting opinion.

Yeah, and that's why I responded to you. I didn't mean to insult you, but you have to recognize that you're the 1/100 I clicked into and didn't find something horrific. It's a useful tool so I don't waste time digging up links just so someone can respond "lol retard libcuck." And that happens often enough that someone made a tool to stop it.

Anyway, I'm glad that you seem like the rare conservative who seems repulsed by police brutality. If you're interested in the subject of our (in)justice system, check out Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow." It really opened my eyes as to the iniquity inherent in our policing systems.

Well, there is a lot packed into your post, but I will say that other countries have not had to "solve" this problem because they have not CREATED a problem in the first place in the way the United States has. No nation on earth has as high an incarceration rate as the U.S.... not even China! See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate Only the Seychelles Islands have a higher rate, and the second highest rate is the US Virgin Islands!

Regarding Jim Crow, this is an excellent book that puts things in perspective regarding African Americans: http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

If this person is a minority, then The New Jim Crow is like...the perfect book that addresses the problems you mentioned directly.

sure!

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives
Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes

You should check out Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness if you are interested in learning more about the cost of incarceration both economically and on American society as a whole. It's a great book.

Okay, since it seems like your serious as most people who would say what you said are actually being disingenuous, but since you do seem to be honest I do have more for you:

"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates (systematic mistreatment of African Americans in the economic sphere)

"The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" by Ta-Nehisi Coates (the Moynihan report and the fragmentation of African-American families due to crime, 50 years on)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class by Ian Haney López

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467968837&sr=8-1&keywords=the+new+jim+crow

There are, in fact, many, many facts to support my position. Just because class (which happens to be closely tied to race) also plays into the equation doesn't mean that racism isn't at the heart of the problem. Educate yourself, my friend:

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

https://www.amazon.com/Ghettoside-True-Story-Murder-America-ebook/dp/B0062OCN4E

https://www.amazon.com/Just-Mercy-Story-Justice-Redemption/dp/081298496X

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness https://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_hahADb8NW59TG

This isn't a fucking game where after I "get" to play the race card you then get to say something ignorant, lazy and wrong. Race is a serious deadly issue that requires deep empathy and knowledge. Things you lack. You think that comment makes you look good because you whitewashed history and appealed to classic liberal values? You look like a cocksure child in University. Ignorant to the depths of your own ignorance.

Read a book

You've made an empirical claim with no data. You accuse the protesters of irrationality, but you call a claim "bullshit" with no evidence to support your statement.

Here's a bit of evidence:
http://facultyhiring.uoregon.edu/special-concerns/

I'd highly recommend you read The New Jim Crow. Hell, I'll buy you a copy if you promise to read the whole thing.

Yup.

Further reading.

> based on a non statistically supported total bullshit argument

TBF you didn't refute anything either. Having a conversation about race relations is extremely difficult to have with an internet stranger. If you're genuinely curious about what white privilege is, and how it has affected this countries history, then I'd highly recommend The New Jim Crow. You might actually understand exactly what Kaep is trying to fight for, and why it's so important. Yes, Watt did something amazing. No one is taking that away from him. Kaep is trying to change what has been a problem for this country for centuries.

The New Jim Crow Highly recommend you read this book.

Oh got it. They shouldn't speak because their opinions are "wrong" according to you, plus you apparently don't even understand their positions. You think anyone is saying "the white man" is the problem? The problem is systemic racism which is way bigger and harder to tear down than personal racism. You talk about only wanting to hear from experts, look up some research on the factor race plays in every aspect of the criminal justice system and it is pretty clear. I'd recommend the book "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander as a starting point. That book opened my eyes to racism exists way beyond individuals.

I think it is misguided (and insulting) to suggest they don't care about the issues and are just using it as a marketing ploy, especially as it seems to benefit one more to stay out of politics as an entertainer or athlete. As to celebrities mostly being left leaning, what about most coal miners being right leaning? There is nothing mathematically impossible (nor improbable) about people who share similar financial and social conditions being aligned politically.

Everyone interested in this topic MUST read Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow.
In America, our silence perpetuates a system of mass incarceration at great cost to our society.

Also, the documentary The House I Live In is a MUST watch.

Psychology is often concerned with the role of social conditions in things like incarceration. You would benefit from reading a book like this

Read https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/

It's certainly not perfect but you may like it. Alexander shits on the Bill Clinton and I'm sure you'll get a kick out of that.

thanks.
ck out ...
https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

I said

>Gotta love a cop that acts like he gives a shit about racism. Fuck outta here

As institutional and fleshed out racism is in the prison industrial complex and LE culture; it's not too outlandish to say if a cop isn't racist, they are either indifferent to it or an apathetic person. I was implying you could be any of those. The reports will always match, right? I'm not a cop, nor a lawyer, but I do have a bachelor's in Criminology and Justice Studies and I'm a paralegal now at a criminal firm. Amateur and rookie as fuck, yes, but I'm not a complete outsider or a google warrior about this shit. What I mean to say is, I'm pretty comfortable with my assertion.

The good cops are still privy to a very corrupt system. It's embattled with all this shit and people don't want to lose their jobs, become jaded, whatever the fuck. You might even be a good person, but don't act like you don't know what you're apart of. I can't *prove* you've witnessed or done some racist shit at work, but I'd wager $100 you have.

And, about Uncle Tom versus the n-word... you make a good point. I stand by my asshole joke, though. I wouldn't say it to someone personally, but it's attention whore fuckin Kanye and he's acting like a little bitch, so I dgaf. Dragon Energy? Dude is gonna wind up with Tiger Blood like Charlie Sheen. RIP Kanye.

>No, you aren't. You are desperate to blame your bogeyman and don't want to speak to the people in question.

I speak to these people every single day.

>Look, I appreciate this is a ballache to deal with. I had the same problem when we voted to leave the European Union over here. We've had to come to terms and unpick the stupid, myriad but ultimately not racist reasons people chose to Leave.

It's not the same thing.

>Like it or not, that's what you have to do now. You can't just blame it on fucking white supremacy for gods sake. You are NEVER going to get people voting for you if that's the line you take! You can't shame people anymore. It doesn't work! They don't identify as white supremacists. If they don't, your line of attack has no effect because they know themselves better who they are than you do!

I'm not trying to get anyone to vote for anything. I am observing that I believe a substantial percentage of the American public would accept authoritarianism at this point in history. I believe that the willingness to accept authoritarianism is linked to our long and deep history of white supremacy that infuses everything here: economics, politics, real estate, education. Everything. In short, the white population that has enjoyed a privileged position in society is resentful when it has to compete for crumbs with people of color. This is true, whether or not the people themselves deny being racist. It is a sense of entitlement that the "jobs" are "our jobs" to be taken by "them" who are not qualified but get the job due to laws created to ensure equal access to opportunity.

It is the sense that schools are filling up with undesirables so we need more choice, more options to flee the public education (such as private school vouchers).

It's the sense that led real estate agents to redline certain neighborhoods, keeping our residential areas segregated.

>They don't identify as white supremacists.

My argument isn't what they identify themselves as. My argument is that living in the United States is living in a society in which the environment is white supremacist. It's an environment in which white privilege was built on the back of black chattel slavery. It is a legacy that persists. To understand this better, you might want to read these books:

The New Jim Crow

Dog Whistle Politics

White Rage

Without that, it's somewhat pretentious to lecture an American on American society when you don't live in and weren't raised in America. Don't you think? (ETA: In fact, you really don't know anything about me, do you?)

>If they don't, your line of attack has no effect because they know themselves better who they are than you do!

I'm not attacking anything. I am not trying convince them of anything. I am making observations about American society. Very few people are openly racist or even admit to themselves that they are racist. Yet racism is rampant. How often have you heard, "I'm not racist, but..." You might as well tattoo "racist" on your forehead when you say that.

> I'm arguing that you shouldn't dwell on that emotion,

i directly answered this when i wrote "its not like black people are walking around everyday being bitter. but, just try to see how it can bubble over when you can trace your ancestry to a receipt....."

Implying that no black person is continuously and consciously walking around dwelling on slavery. But rather, there are events (outside of your control) that remind you of this fact. Your response to this is to "stop dwelling on it". You flat out don't know what you're talking about. Stop here.

Since I don't like leaving you empty handed here is a great book to get you started

Classism definitely exists, but like everything else doesn't exist in a bubble. Class, race, gender, sex, age...these things all intersect and interact in ways that make social realities for people. Academics (which I am not) have different opinions about the extent to which one is more important than another. I would say yes, historically it has been far more difficult for a person of color to move up in American society and yes, that is still the case today. But I'm just a guy on reddit who likes to read. If you're interested in this stuff here's where I started: The Color of Law, New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the autobiography of Malcolm X, The Warmth of Other Suns

"the only racism is anti-white racism."

I didn't write that. I wrote the only institutional discrimination is against whites via affirmative action, quotas, bonus SAT points, and racial preferences.

Read this and let's discuss.

OK, lets discuss. Blacks are in prison more than whites for several reasons: The commit exponentially more crime, their sentences are tougher due to recidivism, they are much more likely to be busted for drugs since they're more likely to be taking, possessing, or selling drugs.

The US Department of Health and Human Services does regular surveys, and asks people if they take illegal drugs. Blacks are only about 10 to 20 percent more likely than whites to SAY that they do.

www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHresultsPDFWHTML2013/Web/NSDUHresults2013.pdf

But if you look at the arrest data, blacks are 2-1/2 times more likely to be arrested for drug possession and 3.7 times more likely than whites to be arrested for trafficking. So, is this proof of police discrimination?

www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/aus9010.pdf

Do police suddenly go nuts if drugs are involved? Every mayor in Wash DC has been black since 1975. Two thirds of the police officers are black. And yet, the ACLU itself black reports a black DC resident was 8 times more likely than a white resident to be arrested for marijuana possession.

www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf

The idea that blacks don’t use illegal drugs much more often than whites comes from surveys. But when you ask people if they take illegal drugs do they tell the truth? Researchers ask people if they have taken drugs and then take urine or hair samples to find out. And almost every time, blacks are a lot mowhite pre likely than whites to say they haven’t taken drugs but the test then proves they were lying. A study in the Journal of Urban Health, for example, found that blacks were ten times more likely than whites to lie about cocaine. Hispanics were five times more likely. When it came to marijuana, not one of the 109 whites in the sample lied, but one in eight of the 191 blacks lied.

link.springer.com/article/10.1093/jurban/jti065

A study of Vietnam-era veterans in the journal Addictive Behaviors found that blacks were more than 20 times more likely than whites to lie about cocaine, and twice as likely to lie about marijuana.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2495080/

This behavior goes back a long way. In 1994, more than 20 years ago, a large study of young people, aged nine to 20, found that blacks were six times more likely than whites to claim they didn’t use cocaine–but have it show up in a urine test.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7960302/

Want more data? Every year, the US Department of Health and Human Services tells us how many people went to the emergency room because they took an illegal drug and got sick or went crazy. Since the government tabulates these numbers by race, we can calculate rates. Blacks are 3-1/2 times more likely than whites to go to the emergency room because they took an illegal drug.

archive.samhsa.gov/data/2k13/DAWN2k11ED/DAWN2k11ED.pdf

> Umm not to be obstreperous... but you started the entire conversation with a straw man of the white community.

It's a forum, I don't think commenting is considered unruly. Nice 2 dollar word though.

A straw man is a misrepresentation of an argument or position. Of course, being neither of those things, it would be impossible to set up a straw man of "the white community".

> The most blood thirsty, throw Zimmerman to the wolves people I know are all white. It's as if they wanted to condemn him without even hearing the evidence as some kind of sacrifice to atone for past digressions of white people (despite him not being white).

Okay, that's an interesting observation. Have you considered the selection effect as one possible cause?

As for the past digressions (surely you meant transgressions, but I digress) of white people, maybe we should ask what this case says about the justice system's current transgression against people of color, particularly young black men. Lots of good info out there, including Bryan Stevenson's Ted Talk and Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow.

Edit: bad night for my articles.

Edit 2: Another great watch related to this is Fruitvale Station, which just came out this weekend. That makes me really, really sad.

This is precisely the argument of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:

http://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419229353&sr=8-1&keywords=new+jim+crow

> Its the chicken or the egg issue. All I know is that if you work hard, reguardless of race you can be successful, and it wasn't always like that.

And some races receive much fairer treatment under the law than others. I don't understand why you're pretending this isn't the case.

You don't have to listen to me. Do your own research, vet your own facts, account for biases. Just don't be willfully ignorant.

https://www.amazon.com/At-Dark-End-Street-Resistance/dp/0307389243

https://www.amazon.com/Name-War-Philips-American-Identity/dp/0375702628/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269332&sr=1-3&keywords=king+phillip%27s+war

https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Gates-Immigration-Exclusion-1882-1943/dp/0807854484/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269354&sr=1-1&keywords=At+america%27s+gates

https://www.amazon.com/We-Sell-Drugs-American-Crossroads/dp/0520280784/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269378&sr=1-1&keywords=We+sell+drugs

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483269450&sr=8-1&keywords=new+jim+crow

https://www.amazon.com/Lavender-Scare-Persecution-Lesbians-Government/dp/0226401901/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483269475&sr=8-1&keywords=lavender+scare

https://www.amazon.com/Refried-Elvis-Rise-Mexican-Counterculture/dp/0520215141

https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Their-Own-Battles-Americans/dp/1469618958

https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Sisters-Second-Wave-Liberation-Washington/dp/0252077547/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483269640&sr=1-1&keywords=radical+sisters

That'll get you started

Maybe reading something other than Wikipedia will help.

> US Prisons require you to be sent there by a jury of your peers

How many hundreds of thousands of black people have faced all or nearly-all white juries in the South, and continue to do so?

https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431

The US has prosecutors and DAs looking out for their re-election, the gulag system had a commissar. In the end, even though there is somewhat more due process in the US, by sheer numbers America is outdoing the old Soviet Union. It's not even close.

Did you click the link? Try this one: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Color%20Blind

>However, when we speak of inequality, we are led to believe that inequality is fueled solely by white America. That simply isn’t the case.

Your problem is listening to MSM discourse on racism in the first place. It's mostly just white people dominating the conversation, saying nonsense, left and right.

When you go to people like Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, or Michelle Alexander, or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Karen Ho, or Deepa Kumar, or anybody with a narrative that isn't white, you quite quickly come to understand how it is indeed that inequality is solely fueled by white America. Racism in America didn't start with black people. Racism in America isn't perpetuated by black people either; the war on drugs isn't a black American idea. But it's not like you can treat minorities they way white people do and expect them to be like, "Yeah! I wanna be cool with those guys!"

Discrimination by minorities is a reaction to, and not cause of, the racism of white America. The feedback loop between discrimination by minorities and racism by white America is pretty much where we're at.

To be explicit: that's not to say that minority communities don't have social problems of their own. But then here comes white America screaming, "Identity politics is destroying America!" People on the left and right proclaim this! It's like they expect minorities to live up to a certain colorless, featureless identity (one that caters to white people because it's not like they're calling for an identity of blackness or Hispanics or Asians) in order to overcome some social obstacle, then white America will turn around and say, "Well, what about the problems in your community?" What do you mean my community? I thought we all had the same identity? I thought you and I were supposed to help each other with our social obstacles...

White America absolutely fuels inequality.

I toyed with trying to soften that accusatory blow...but fuck it. I've read all of those books I linked except one. I got all day to defend what I've said here.

Crime is socioeconomically driven. You should checkout:
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

The solution starts with acknowledging, The New Jim Crow really showed me how the system is stacked.

From a capitalist perspective I see people like Freeway Rick Ross who created a billion dollar drug industry and think about all the amazing talent we are losing because certain communities, not just black, are not offered opportunities. Any solution starts with creating an effective and equitable education system.

> As of right now, the past Obama administration and even the Trump administration the only illegals that being deported are those whom are committing crimes.

"Crimes" are different for people who are white and people who aren't white.

You should check out The New Jim Crow. I doubt you will though, you clearly don't seem like the person interested in knowing about things before you spoke.