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Millions ended up in the Soviet Gulag prison system, and the same thing is happening in the U.S. and for the same reasons. The Soviets were waging an ideological war against anyone who objected to their worldview, and in the U.S. the elites are doing the same thing. The elites tend to be of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) background and their power structure has been dominant in the U.S. from the beginning. So while slavery ended in the 19th century, Jim Crow replaced it and today the New Jim Crow via mass incarceration of the black male population is the means of control and oppression that the elites use to enslave the black community. If this is not a human rights and civil rights issue, I don’t know what is.
The war on drugs and involvement of U.S. Presidents has been particularly problematic. President Clinton, for instance, promoted a “get tough” on crime policy and endorsed the “three strikes and you’re out” law, which essentially threw the book at the black population that was already being unfairly targeted by the criminal justice system and given strict and harsh sentences for drug use and trafficking.7 Reagan, who rolled out the War on Drugs, oversaw Operation Pipeline which allowed officers to use minor violations as a pretext for searches, seizures and arrests—a direct violation of everything the Constitution meant to protect against.8 The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure but this is not surprising as the U.S. government and its CIA are part of the problem of smuggling and trafficking drugs—for example, it is no coincidence that heroin use around the world and in the U.S. spiked dramatically once U.S. soldiers “liberated” the poppy fields in Afghanistan, which is where heroin comes from.
They liberated it by opening up the drug trade even wider than ever as a means of funding CIA black operations. This is no secret to anyone but it goes unaddressed because the CIA is operated by the same members of the WASP establishment that have always overseen the system. They go unpunished while Presidents like Reagan, Clinton, Bush I and Bush II all do whatever they can to enforce unfair drug laws so as to keep the prison industrial complex well-fed with human lives from minority populations. The repercussions of this War are that millions of lives are shattered, families are broken up and…
New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness offers a scathing and disturbing portrait of institutionalized racism in the United States. In an article written for the Huffington Post that supplements her book, Alexander states plainly: "There are more African-Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the
New Jim Crow When considering the introduction and chapter three of Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, arguably the most important conceptional foundation to remember is the notion of social oppression, and particularly the fact that social oppression can occur with or without the knowledge or intention of the dominant social group. As Hardiman, Jackson, and Griffin note in their contribution to Readings
One of the major components of these Jim Crow laws was disenfranchisement which was "largely the work of rural and urban white elites who sought to reassure" whites in the south that white supremacy was the law of the land. As a result, lynching and other forms of violence against blacks were endorsed, encouraged and rationalized in the minds of most southern whites (Rabinowitz, 168). A prominent spokesman against African-American
When he became president through the assassination of President Kennedy, he not only accepted the civil rights agenda of President Kennedy but he was successful in passing pivotal legislation. Through shrewd deal making and lobbying of senators he was able to get a bill passed which prohibited segregation in places involved in interstate commerce. The following year when attempts were made to restore voting rights to blacks in the south
Slavery was more than an economic institution; it had completely radicalized the nation. Identity was inextricably tied up with race; even after emancipation, blacks were not truly free, and were certainly not equal. Even in the North, African Americans were second-class citizens, but it was in the South where racism truly flourished. Jim Crow was the most notable manifestation of official policies that preserved racist institutions for generations. When the
Reconstruction: Successes and FailuresReconstruction after the Civil War was a mixed bag of successes and failures. If its primary aim was reintegration of the South into the US, it could be said to be a success. The problem with Reconstruction is that the architects of Reconstruction were themselves divided about how it should proceed. The Radicals wanted vengeance, whereas Lincoln (before he was murdered) called for forgiveness. The US government