Melissa Harris-Perry Is Smarter Than Everybody

“If we believe culture & choices are to blame for bad outcomes, solutions coalesce around individual punishments rather than systemic change.”

-Melissa Harris-Perry

King Of All Hip-Hop and First Husband to Queen Beyonce Jay-Z released the video equivalent of an epic mic drop on the front page of the New York Times website on Wednesday, a collaboration with the Drug Policy Alliance documenting the titanic failure that has been America’s War On Drugs over the last thirty years.

Starting with Reagan’s dismantling of the social safety in the Eighties and moving all the way through Bill Clinton’s crime and welfare reform efforts in the Nineties to the modern, Caucasian-exclusive marijuana legalization economy, Hova and fellow collaborators Molly Crabapple and Dream Hampton serve up a blistering indictment of sordid affair, one as heartbreaking as it is enraging.

Well-timed to divert some much-needed attention to this chancre sore of a domestic issue in the final run-up to the presidential election, Team Roc-A-Fella invite us all to “stand on the right side of history” when it comes time to cast our ballots this November. Like most efforts of its kind, the video tends to preach to the choir a bit much, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.

What does make the video less valuable, however, is that it only tells half the story. And as per usual, it’s the male half. Thankfully, the Internet has Melissa Harris-Perry to *ahem* correct the record.

The Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC pundit quickly issued a rebuttal to the video after it was released, reminding everyone that when speaking about the Drug War, we need to turn the clock back even further to the early Seventies and examine how much of it is rooted in the demonizing of black women as a means to gutting social services.

Beginning with the now-infamous report entitled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” MHP informs us that then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan essentially concern-trolled multiple generations of black people into desolation and depravity, concluding that black women were the central problem facing American black communities. Without the so-called “Moynihan Report,” there are no welfare queens, no mythological “crack babies,” no mandatory minimums, and no modern carceral state.

After publishing the piece on the website The Undefeated, MHP took to Twitter to give her followers a brief synopsis in 140-character bursts. If brevity is the soul of wit, then she is one of the most sagacious people on the Internet. Each tweet is like a punch in the chest, driving home a fully contextualized understanding of just how fucked up the Drug War actually is, and why we need to stab the beast in the heart. I’ve collected a few excerpts of them below. Be warned: reading these might cause you to flip a table or two.

Here’s hoping that next time Jay-Z wants to produce a propaganda piece, he’ll remember to give MHP a call so he can get his “herstory” lessons in private.

You can check out the NYT video below: