Ryan Metzger - Racial Disparity and its Plaguing of America

 Ryan Metzger - 3/18/2021

Racial Disparity - Arguement

Crack Vs. Cocaine - A Disparity Like No Other (Lacroix)

    Throughout the entirety of The New Jim Crow, Alexander has been proving her underlying argument that there is systemic racial disparity in America. Be it the police, the C.I.A, the U.S. Government, the Justice Departent, the courts, or the jails, racial disparity plays a role in the treatment of individuals throughout America. Alexander proves this argument definitively and effectively through the use of extensive research and facts. I must admit, I really appreciate the style Alexander uses to form arguments over an extended period of time, almost like she is building a court case. Alexanders investigative journalism allows The New Jim Crow to thrive in its logical and emotional evidence, and is able to display the sequence and similarity in which events have played out in American history.

    "Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living "free" in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow"(Alexander p.141). 

    At the beginning of Chapter 4, Alexander starts with this extremely bold statement that many may argue is not true, but armed with statistics, court rulings, and everything inbetween, Alexander is willing to make these "outlandish" claims because she knows she has the evidence to back them up.

    Though it may be a shock, Alexander is 100% right to say that criminals released from prison just barely have more rights than a freed Black person during the Jim Crow era. In modern America, we have a system that does not rehabilitate prisoners, it destroys their lives, and it leaves them powerless and jobless for their entire lives. If you look deeper into the policies implemented starting in the 70s at the start of The War on Drugs, you will see massive disparities in laws that were meant to destroy the Black community, and protect the white community.

    A critical example of this is the sentencing desparity between a person who posseses Crack, and someone who posseses Cocaine. As we know, the Crack Epidemic mainly effected poor Black communities that did not have enough money to buy drugs like Cocaine, so they resorted to Crack use. With this in mind, what do you think the sentence disparity between having Crack or Cocaine was decided to be? Surely the justice system would not be blatantly racist with their policies on drugs, right?

     "It takes 28 grams of crack cocaine to net a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, while it still takes selling 500 grams of powdered cocaine to net the same sentence. There should be no dispairity - the ratio should be one-to-one"(Alexander p.139).

     Though you might expect this to be a law during the height on The War on Drugs, this is actually a policy implemented by President Obama. The even more rediculous part, is that the disparity during The War on Drugs was 100 to 1! 

    Alexander deeply goes into depth about this dispair, and provides an immense amount of evidence, just to solidify her argument even though it's not hard to tell why these policies were created in this manner. 

    If you take a look back through the age of The War on Drugs, these policies are so blatantly racist and self serving to the government, its hard to believe they are even partially in place today! As we know, the C.I.A was smuggling Cocaine accross the border in order to fund illegal operations in Nicaragua. So one could only wonder as to why the justice system would just decide to make a 100 to 1 disparity between the sale and possesion of Cocaine and of Crack.

    It actually goes much deeper than this though, as per usual, there is an even more sinister thought process behind the laws implemented during The War on Drugs. There are two other main reasons as to why there was a disparity besides the C.I.A smuggling cocaine into the U.S.

    The first reason requires a little bit of background... the production of Crack comes from the base of cocaine, it is then mixed with other chemicals and essentially just creates a cheap and potent smokable version of cocaine. So as the C.I.A smuggled and sold cocaine to drug dealers accross the U.S, these dealers would produce Crack Cocaine which was then rapidly sold to poor Black communities accross America. Becuase of this disparity, it allowed the C.I.A to safely get Cocaine to dealers. Then the dealers made crack cheaply available to many Black Americans, even if a user only had a couple grams of Crack on them, they became felons. Which as we know, essentially casts you out of any power in society which is exactly what the government wanted for the Black communities.

     The second reason for this disparity is much more simple, and is plainly racist. It is because Cocaine was the drug of rich white people who could afford to pay for cocaine instead of cheaper Crack Cocaine. Essentially, it was a free pass to white people who could get caught with nearly a half a kilogram of cocaine, and not even come close to the amount of jail time done as a poor Black person who only had a couple of grams of Crack on them. Many times, white people were not even sent to jail or even charged with much at all for posession of Cocaine, and this is why the people on wallstreet were able to throw massive parties full of Cocaine, and still have no reprocusion. 

    So how does all of this connect? As we know, if you are caught with just a few grams of Crack, you are going to become a felon. We also know that if you are a felon, you are powerless, and you are treated extremely poorly, you don't have the right to vote, and you are essentially stripped of your freedom. And this, is exacly what the government wanted to do, and Alexander manages to perfectly present this argument with a concise and connected timeline that supports her inital argument, that "Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living "free" in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow"(Alexander p.141). 

    The even more amazing thing about Alexanders style of systemically debunking racist policies in America, is that she is able to connected all of them back to the base cause of her book, that there is still a systemic racial disparity throughout America. This is what leaves the reader intrigued, and questioning our modern day government and society instead of blindly following what they are told. This is my favorite part of the book, and is why I enjoy reading it in order to understand another deeper layer of what is our systemically racist government, because when you know whats wrong with something, you can find the solutions to fix it.

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