response 11/7
This week’s article, Who Are the Super Predators? discusses systemic violence against black men in the U.S. There was some interesting overlap for me while reading this article because I had just been reading about mass incarceration and institutionalized racism in another urban studies class, so this article brought up many things I have been thinking about recently. Right before reading this article, I had watched a speech in that class by Michelle Alexander, in which she talked about how the criminal justice is designed to disenfranchise racial minorities, especially black men, in order to eliminate any threats to white supremacy.
Melissa Valentine, the author of the article, tells the story of her brother, who, she writes, was a victim of the criminal justice system and the racist method of social control that it perpetuates. Having my eyes open to what is really going on, and looking at the statistics is shocking, and almost mind-numbing. The disproportionate numbers of black men in prison, black men cut off from society because of felony records, and the proportion of black babies that will spend time in prison — 1/3, according to the article — seems unreal, fifty years after the Civil Rights Act.
As Valentine writes, though, these numbers are abstract, they aren’t quite visible. Just like homelessness and poverty, this is a problem that is so often out of sight and out of mind if you are a privileged white person, like myself. Americans of all races do drugs at more or less equal rate, so why would it be that black men are almost exclusively the drug criminals? Why are so many families of color stuck in a cycle of poverty and incarceration?
Valentine writes that it is the ghetto that breeds black criminals. She defines ghetto as “historically segregated and resource deprived neighborhoods.” People who grow up in these neighborhoods have the odds against them. If an individual lives in an area where there is nowhere to buy healthy food, no professional jobs, an absence of economic diversity, and high crime rates, of course it will be more likely for the individual to struggle. For those Americans that grow up in wealthy suburban areas, incarceration rates are lower, regardless of how many people do drugs.
I come from a mostly white, small city type place and I could not imagine being arrested for drug possession of even dealing. Where I’m from, everyone smokes weed, and it’s no problem to get most psychedelics and party drugs. But who would go after suburban white hippy kids? That’s where it becomes clear that the war on drugs is not about drugs — it’s about social control, similar to broken windows policing.
If black men are perceived as a threat to society as a whole, instead of as a threat to white supremacy, institutional oppression will only continue to strengthen. Only once the criminal justice system is exposed for what it really is — a method of social control that imprisons and disenfranchised certain people to protect the superiority of others — will it finally be able to be dismantled.
