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The war on drugs is racist. Donald Trump is embracing it with open arms
[Guardian] When I first read the Washington Post story that the US attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, wants to "bring back" the "war on drugs", I thought to myself: bring back? Where did it go? Is General Sessions himself on drugs? Because, despite a few modest reforms, somebody would have to be high to think the war on drugs has really gone away.But the framing of an impetus to "bring back" the drug war is the same as Donald Trump’s fantasy of making America "great again" and must be understood for exactly what it is: a white power grab to control black and brown people couched in the restoration of past glory. Drugs have long been used to scapegoat black and Latino people, even as study after study finds that white youth use drugs more than their non-white peers and white people are the more likely to have contraband on them when stopped by police. As Trump plans a "deportation force", a war on drugs amped up on raids will help create darker-skinned scapegoats as he rips immigrant communities apart. General Sessions will lead this war for Trump. Standing on the US-Mexico border, General Sessions mischaracterized immigration as consisting of "criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens". Evoking the same racialized sexual fear to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment that his boss did when he began his campaign by calling Mexican rapists, Sessions ignored that immigrants commit fewer crimes as he defiantly took a "stand against this filth". The war on drugs is itself a kind of opiate of the white masses, hustled and imbibed to stoke white people’s fear about people of color ‐ even as there already about 1.5 million black men already disappeared from US society by early death or incarceration. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-04-18 |
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