Present Day
Many people attribute the passing of the Civil Rights Act with the end of the Jim Crow Era however, as during Reconstruction, more systemic measures were put into place. Jim Crow laws take on different forms in the present day. We are now a colorblind society, in which we take policies at face value without looking at the application of them. Laws put into place are designed to specifically target people of color, without explicitly saying so. Things like the War on Drugs and mass incarceration especially disproportionately affect people of color, as well as brutality at the hands of police officers.
The War on Drugs was put into effect by President Nixon and continued with President Reagan, starting in 1971. Mandatory minimum sentences were put into place for certain drugs, with the greatest disparities placed between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. The two are the same drug in different forms, however one is much cheaper and the other is more expensive. People of color systematically earn less money than their white counterparts, and since crack cocaine is much cheaper, people of color buy it more. Powder cocaine is referred to as a white drug. The sentencing disparity between the two is 100-1, meaning 5 grams of crack cocaine receives the same sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine, as established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. An article published by the ACLU details the sentencing disparity and the implications it holds for people of color (https://www.aclu.org/other/cracks-system-20-years-unjust-federal-crack-cocaine-law). These harsh disparities leads to the mass incarceration of black people because it takes so little of the drug to receive a minimum of 5 years in prison. What the War on Drugs does is ignore the underlying issues behind addiction and simply seeks to punish the offender instead of rehabilitation. According to the ACLU, black people make up 74% of those in prison on a drug sentence.
In the years following Nixon’s original coining of the term, audio recordings of a close official of his has been released stating the reasoning for declaring the War on Drugs was to disrupt “hippie and black communities.” They associated marijuana with hippies and heroin with black people. Because of that association made, there is always a reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk people of color. The stop and frisk policy has been going on since around the 1960’s, however in the 1980’s the courts allowed officers to “stop-and-question” as long as there was probable cause, whereas before the person had to have been arrested before or have a warrant out. This was amended to “stop-and-frisk” in the 90’s. This, along with broken windows policing, allows for the disproportionate searches and arrests of people of color for low level drug offenses. Under the guise of colorblindness, race cannot explicitly be used as a justification of criminalization so more systemic measures, like the War on Drugs, had to be put into place in order to maintain the supremacy.
Cases of police brutality seem to come up everyday, which each being different than the last. The case of Michael Brown sparked outrage and prompted protests nationwide. Michael Brown was an 18 year old who was stopped by officer Darren Wilson because he matched the description of a robber in the area. Regardless of what Brown did prior to being stopped, his murder is absolutely not justified. Brown was unarmed, and subsequently shot at least 7 times by the officer. Police are supposed to be trained in de-escalation, not shooting as soon as they feel threatened. If they are not adequately trained in how to handle situations that could turn violent, then they should not be police officers. This case is a prime example of the colorblind society we live in today. White people everyday are being arrested by police officers, but there are not nearly as many cases of police brutality. With people of color the answer seems to be shoot first, ask questions later. A study from the University of California concluded unarmed black people have a 3.49 times higher chance of being killed by police than white people do, unrelated to the crime committed. Because of this, there is very little confidence between police and people of color. How are people supposed to feel safe when those committed to protecting and serving them are doing the opposite? This lack of confidence also stems from the lack of accountability when a person of color is killed by an officer. Darren Wilson did not receive an indictment, the officers involved in the beating of Rodney King were found not guilty, the officer who killed Eric Garner was not indicted, and the list goes on.Â
In Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she writes about this new system of colorblindness and how it plays into the current criminal justice system. She writes “The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told... Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.” She details that while it appears voluntary, everybody makes mistakes. White people, more often than not, get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to that. Drug offenders should not be sitting in prison, serving mandatory minimum sentences for these non-violent offenses. The system is extremely flawed and systemically set up in a way in which it is very difficult for people of color to succeed. The only way to have some kind of hope in fixing this broken system is to completely take it down and restructure it, from the ground up.
