Q. - Yo! Ed why is there a "War"
on some drugs?
A. The # 1 reason is Racism
-JUST CHECK OUT THIS ( RACIST DRUG LAWS) To understand where I'm coming from.
Drugs that
Caucasians produce and crave are legal!example: Tobacco, Alcohol, Percocet, Zolloff etc. At one time do gooders tried to ban alcohol, 1919-1933 as the destruction mounted in white communities over the violence and black-markets created by this prohibition, it was repealed.
Drugs that are produced or
grown by minorities are illegal! example: Marijuana, Cocaine, Heroin, Khate, Bhang. The same destructive force's have besieged black communities.Our communities have become acknowledged war zone's.
Not because of the drugs, but the law that creates this black-market. Any prohibition would cause the same reaction in a so-called free society. Instead of repealing this prohibition as was done when the destructive consequence's emerged in white communities. Now the white community,(LAWYERS-LAW
ENFORCEMENT ) have
capitalized off it's destruction, and misery. Over 30 percent of minority males are now enslaved by the RACIST WAR ON DRUGS! One of the best investments on the stock market is PRIVATE PRISONS. - The prison system is another form of legal slavery.
Q.- What would happen if the DRUG LAWS were repealed and
Marijuana Prohibition
were lifted?
A.-
A whole lotta white folk would be outta work- (prison guards, police officers, lawyers,
etc,etc,..) and there would be 1
million more minorities free to vote. - Things would change for the
better.
The war on drugs is a lot more racist
than most people want to acknowledge.
THE MEDIA VIRTUAL IGNORE'S THIS
OTHER THAN TO USE THE STATIC's. In my case, I don't drink much alcohol
(occasionally I'll have a beer). I don't smoke tobacco at all,
and most prescibtion drugs I reject as to dangerous. I prefer the
natural herb marijuana. I'll even go further and say, "I think blackmen
should smoke marijuana, alcohol is not for us". For the hyper, or
aggressive among us there is no better natural remedy. Many of us
use marijuana as a anger management tool. Alcohol on the other
hand has caused as much damage to black culture and society as It
has to the indigenous people's of america - INDIANS. Alcohol
make's me aggressive, I lose some of my control, this is why I don't
drink. Many, many black men have the same reaction to alcohol
(causian drug). We read about it every weekend, in bars across
the country. Violence. YES, I know some white's react to alcohol
violently too, I must acknowledge that.. But not at the rate, or
frequently of blackemen.
RESULTS OF THIS RACIST DRUG WAR!
1.Between 1990 and 1996 the real number
of black men and women in federal prison for violent and property
crimes decreased by 726. Despite these reductions in violent and
property crime sentences, 12,852 black men and women were added
to federal prisons for drug law violations over the same period.
Source: Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Prisoners in 1997, Washington D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office (1998), pg. 13.
2.Only 11% of the nation's drug users are black, however blacks
constitute almost 37% of those arrested for drug violations, over
42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations, and almost 60% of
those in state prisons for drug felonies.
Sources: Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration, National Household Survey on Drug
Abuse: Population Estimates 1996, Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Services Administration (1997), p. 19, Table
2D; Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Statistics 1996, Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office
(1997), p. 382, Table 4.10, and p. 533, Table 6.36; Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Prisoners in 1996, Washington D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office (1997), p. 10, Table 13.
3.Fifty-four percent (54%) of blacks
convicted of drug offenses get sentenced to prison versus 34% of whites
convicted of the same offenses. Forty-four percent (44%) of blacks get
prison sentences for possession versus 29% of whites; 60% of
blacks are sentenced to prison for trafficking while 37% of whites are
sentenced to prison for the same crime.
Source: Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics,Washington D.C.:
Bureau of Justice Statistics (1996), p. 501, Table 5.50.
4.All major Western European nations'
incarceration rates are about or below 100 per 100,000. In the United
States, in 1995, the incarceration rate for African-American women was
456 per 100,000, and for African-American men 6,926 per 100,000.
Source: Currie, E., Crime and
Punishment in America, New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and
Company, Inc. (1998), p. 15; Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook
of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996, Washington D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office (1997), p. 510, Table 6.12.
5.The United States incarcerates
African-American men at a rate that is approximately four times
the rate of incarceration of Black men in South Africa.
Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and
Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy:
Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American
Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 714.
6.At the start of the 1990s, the U.S.
had more Black men (between the ages of 20 and 29) under the control of
the nation's criminal justice system than the total number in college.
This and other factors have lead some scholars to conclude that, "crime
control policies are a major contributor to the disruption of the
family, the prevalence of single parent families, and children raised
without a father in the ghetto, and the `inability of people to get the
jobs still available.'"
Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and
Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy:
Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American
Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 716.
7.The rate of imprisonment for black
women is more than eight times the rate of imprisonment of white women;
the rate of imprisonment of Hispanic women is nearly four times the
rate of imprisonment of white women.
Source: Amnesty International, "Not
Part of My Sentence:" Violations of the Human Rights of Women in
Custody, Washington, DC: Amnesty International (1999, March), p.
19.
8. - 1.46 million black men out of a
total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right to vote
due to felony convictions.
Source: Thomas, P., "Study
Suggests Black Male Prison Rate Impinges on Political Process," The
Washington Post (1997, January 30), p. A3.
9.Given current rates of incarceration,
three in ten of the next generation of Black men will be
disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states with the
most restrictive voting laws, 40 percent of African American men are
like to be permanently disenfranchised.
Source: Jamie Fellner and Mark
Mauer, Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in
the United States, Human Rights Watch & The Sentencing Project,
(1998).
10.One in three black men between the ages of
20 and 29 years old is under correctional supervision or control.
Source: Mauer, M. & Huling, T.,
Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years
Later, Washington D.C.: The Sentencing Project (1995).
11.- At current levels of incarceration,
newborn Black males in this country have a greater than 1 in 4 chance
of going to prison during their lifetimes, while Latin-American males
have a 1 in 6 chance, and white males have a 1 in 23 chance of serving
time.
Source: Bonczar, T.P. & Beck,
A.J., Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison,
Washington D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of
Justice (1997, March).
12.In 1986, before mandatory minimums for
crack offenses became effective, the average federal drug offense
sentence for blacks was 11% higher than for whites. Four years later
following the implementation of harsher drug sentencing laws, the
average federal drug offense sentence was 49% higher for blacks.
Source: Meierhoefer, B. S., The
General Effect of Mandatory Minimum Prison Terms: A Longitudinal Study
of Federal Sentences Imposed, Washington D.C.: Federal Judicial Center
(1992), p. 20.
13.Regardless of similar or equal levels of
illicit drug use during pregnancy, black women are 10 times more likely
than white women to be reported to child welfare agencies for prenatal
drug use.
Sources: Neuspiel, D.R., "Racism
and Perinatal Addiction," Ethnicity and Disease, 6: 47-55 (1996);
Chasnoff, I.J., Landress, H.J., & Barrett, M.E., "The Prevalence
of Illicit-Drug or Alcohol Use during Pregnancy and Discrepancies
in Mandatory Reporting in Pinellas County, Florida," New England
Journal of Medicine, 322: 1202-1206 (1990).
14.In 1995, the incarceration rate for white
and Latin-American women combined was 68 per 100,000. For black women
it was 456 per 100,000.
Source: Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996,Washington
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office (1997), p. 510, Table 6.12.
15.Due to harsh new sentencing
guidelines, such as `three-strikes, you're out,' "a disproportionate
number of young Black and Hispanic men are likely to be
imprisoned for life under scenarios in which they are guilty of little
more than a history of untreated addiction and several prior
drug-related offenses... States will absorb the staggering cost of not
only constructing additional prisons to accommodate increasing
numbers of prisoners who will never be released but also
warehousing them into old age."
Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and
Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy:
Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American
Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 718.
Q.- What roles does the media
play in contining this war?
A.- Read this!
MEDIA BLACKFACE! -- RACIST DRUG WAR!
MEDIA BLACKFACE! -- RACIST DRUG WAR!
"Racial profiling" in news reporting
Racial profiling - the discriminatory practice by police of
treating blackness (or brownness) as an indication of possible
criminality - has lately been the focus of frequent legal or
legislative action, resulting in a significant amount of coverage
in the mainstream news media (e.g. New York Times, 5/8/98,
5/10/98; Nightline, 5/31/98; Time, 6/15/98).
The coverage of police racial profiling has been fairly accurate
and balanced. Yet while the mainstream media continue to
cover
police racial profiling, they have generally failed to
acknowledge
their own practice of media racial profiling. And when
theyhave,
the result has been more cover-up than coverage.
Issues in Blackface There is need for a broader understanding of
"racial profiling." As a general concept and not just a specific
police policy, racial profiling may best be understood as the
politically acceptable and very American practice of defining a
social problems in "black-face" - i.e., in racial terms - through
indirect association. Once portrayed in blackface, the
"blackness" of the problem encourages suspicion, polarizing
antagonism, and typically leads to the targeting of the racial
group for punitive (public policy) action.
The link between the stereotypical profile and the public policy
is key. In police racial profiling it is direct: Individual
officers act on racial stereo-types against racial minorities,
especially African-Americans. But when it comes to the news
media, the racial profiles projected are indirectly related to
punitive public policies, thus giving the mainstream news media
the "out" of deniability. When the news media over-represents
the
number of black people in the category that is at issue, the
issue
becomes "black," stigmatized, worthy of some form of always
justified political punishment and further racialized.
Examples of issues defined in blackface and subjected to a racial
profile include the black drug abuser and drug dealer, the
threatening and invasive black criminal, the black welfare cheat
and queen, and the undeserving black affirmative action
recipient. The punitive actions associated with drugs,
crime
welfare and affirmatieve action policy are self-evident,
involving
punitive action disproportionately affecting African-American
people.
The brilliance of racial profiling as an instrument of modern,
deniable racism is that the issue - be it crime, delfare, drug
abuse or what have you - is seen by many as a real issue that is
only coincidentally about race. The trait of blackness
associated
with the problem is viewed as nothing more than an unfortunate
reality that is secondary to the public hostility and the
punitive
measures. So it's not really racist, is it?
By looking at the ways in which the mainstream news media have
covered (or failed to cover) several recent studies/stories
involving the news media and race, we can begin to get a better
understanding of this practice of racial profiling as it relates
to the news media.
Racial Profiling as the Missing Link In March 1998, two studies
on
U.S. drug policy were released by two prominent groups of
physicians within a day of each other. The first study was
issued
by the Physician Leasdership on National Drug Policy (PLNDP), a
high-profile group of doctors, composed, in part, of high-ranking
health officials from the Reagan, Bush and Clinton
administrations. The voluminous and exhaustively documented
PLNDP
study concluded that drug treatment for drug addiction was not
only an effective health measure but that it was much more
cost-effective than the criminalizing policies of the current
"drug war."
One section of the study showed how, contrary to popular
perception, drug addicts are not primarrily members of minority
racial and ethnic groups. "The research we are releasing today,"
the PLNDP announced at its press conference, "shows,
conclusively,
that drugaddiction is vcry treatable and that it reaches across
all strata of society, with affluent, educated Caucasians being
the most likelv drug users, and the most likely to be addicted."
Looking at adult drug users, the PLNDP study found that more than
half of those who admitted using heroin last year are white and
60
percent of monthly cocaine users are white. (Also, 77 percent
of
regular marijuana users are white, while one in six is
African-American.) Youth drug use followed similar patterns.
Paralleling this point about the public misperception of drug use
were the results of a survey of 50 years of public opinion called
the "The Public and the War on Illicit Drugs," which were
featured
in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
(3/11/98). The study found that although Americans did not
think
the so-called "War on Drugs" was succeeding, they did not want to
abandon the criminalization approach pushed by the government.
The study also found that there was weak support for increasing
funding for drug treatment.
One of its key conclusions was that public opinion polls
indicated
that the overwhelming majority of Americans had "relatively
little
firsthand experience with the extent of the problems associated
with drug use," and that "the majority of Americans report
getting
most of their information about the seriousness of the illicit
drug problems from the news media, mainly television." In fact,
the PLNDP presented the JAMA sutudy at its press conference to
emphasize how public opinion and the judgment of seasoned
physicians were at odds with each other, and how the news media
were playing a leading role in misinforming the public about the
health and financial issues at the heart of "Drug War" policy.
The powerful findings of these two reports were not covered by
any
of the three major newsweeklies (Time, U.S. News & World
Report,
Newsweek), nor were they covered by the New York Times or
Washington Post. When the story was covered, moreover, the
dominant media focused on the disconnect between the views of the
public and the research of the physicians - but said nothing
about
the role of the news media in fostering the stereotypes fueling
the bad druig policy (CNN Today, 3/17/98; Associated Press,
3/17/98; USA Today, 3/18/98).
The role of the news media in promoting racial stereotypes was
the
missing link between the two studies. Even when Nightline
(3/18/98) began its coverage of the story with the acknowledgment
that, when it came to the issuses of drug addiction and drug
policy in the U.S., "most Americans get their information from
the
news media," the show glossed over the central problem of news
media misinformation. Nor did Nighline host Ted Koppel
refrain
from reinforcing the very misconceptions his show could have been
debunking: Koppel's repeated emphasis on how "society does not
want to spend money on rehabilitation" - when a main point of the
PLNDP report was that treatment saves money - amounted to a
brief
for the very media-enforced ignorance the doctors' groups sought
to dispel.
Almost alone in its coverage of this story was an article by Raja
Mishra writ-ten for the Knight Ridder News Service and appearing
in the Denver Post (3/19/98). Mishra went to the heart of
the
story when reporting how "the doctors said the public had been
misled by media accounts." Given the studies, an obvious
conclusion. But it was not so obvious to the mainstream
press.
No Surprise Another study, "Crime in Black and White: The
Violent,
Scary World of Local News" appeared in the academic journal
Press/Politics (Spring/96). Although appearing in a
scholarly
journal on journalism, this study received almost no attention in
the media, except for coverage in the Washington Post (4/'28/97)
by its media correspondent, Howard Kurtz.
Done by UCLA professors Franklin Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar,
"Crime in Black and White" found through a content analysis of
local television station KABC in Los Angeles that coverage of
crime featured two important cues: "crime is violent and
criminals
are non-white." The real revelation was that television viewers
were so accustomed to seeing African-American crime suspects on
the local news that even when the race of a suspect was not
specified, viewers tended to remember seeing a black suspect.
Moreover, when researchers used digital technology to change the
race of certain suspects as they appeared on the screen, a little
over half of those who saw the "white" perpetrator recalled his
race, but two-thirds did when the criminal was depicted as black.
"Ninety percent of the false recognitions involved
African-Americans and Hispanics," Gilliam said.
To his credit, Kurtz acknowledged the public policy implications
of the study when he stated that "support for punitive law
enforcement policies was highest when the stories featured black
suspects or provided no information about race and was lowest
when
the suspects were white." But his response to the "riveting"
findings was fatalistic: "This is not the first complaint about
coverage of minorities and crime, and most local stations have
not
seen fit to change their approach," he wrote. And when he
said
that the study placed a "surprisingly harsh light on television
and racial attitudes," one might ask: To whom should this be
surprising?
When, a few months later, Kurtz addressed another study of racism
in the news media, he again expressed surprise. The study by
Yale
University professor Martin Gilens, entitled "Race and Poverty in
America: Public Misperceptions and the American News Media,"was
published in Public Opinion Quarterly (vol.6, 1996) and found
that
while African-Americans make up 29 percent of the nation's poor,
they constitute 62 percent of the images of the poor in the
leading news magazines, and 65 percent of the images of the poor
on the leading network television news programs. And not
only
were the poor disproportion-ately portrayed as black, but they
were also portrayed in the most unsympathetic fashion. The
most
sympathetic groups of the poor - i.e., the elderly and the
working
poor - were under-represented and the least sympathetic group -
unemployed working-age adults - was over-represented.
Kurtz, who did not discuss these findings in the Washington Post,
was part of a discussion of the study on the CNN "media watch"
program Reliable Sources (8/24/97). "Who Put The Black Face
on
Poverty," the show asked. Well, the mainstream media "whiteout"
of
the story provides a clue. Gilens' study specifically looked
at
the coverage of Time, Newsweek, U.S. News World Report and
ABC, NBC and CBS news. Unsurprisingly, none of these big
media
outlets covered the release of the study results. Neither did the
New
York Times. USA Today (8/9/97) and the Washington Post
(5/15/97)
covered in a mere paragraph or two.
It was left to the Associated Press (8/18/97) and CNN's Reliable
Sources (8/24/97) to really cover the story. AP's coverage
stood
out because it addressed Gilens' point about the news - media
perpetuating racist misperceptions of the poor that are
associated
- with greater opposition to welfare policy among whites.
But in "Who Put the Black Face Poverty," CNN's Reliable
Sourcess
succeeded in avoiding this point altogether - and in denying that
racism was reason the "black face" was on poverty in the first
place. The problem, according to Kurtz, was one of "video
wall
paper" - "the pictures that automatic get thrown up" when big
city
media outlets use photos from, well, big cities with inner cities
populated by high concentrations of poor black people.
The fact that Gilens explicitly addressed and refuted this claim
in study never came up. Also unmentioned was Gilens' point
about
how "apparently well-meaning, racially liberal news professionals
generate images of the social world that consistently
misrepresent
both black Americans and poor people in destructive ways."
Surprised?
Spooking the Public
Given the prevalence of racial profiling documented here and
elsewhere, only makes sense that a recent survey among young
people found that they not recognized that racial stereotyping
was
rampant on television, but that news was a worse perpetrator of
racial stereotyping than TV's entertainment programming.
The poll, sponsored by the advocacy group Children Now,
interviewed 1,200 boys and girls aged l0-17 with 300 children
coming from each the four largest racial groups. White and
African-American children said they see people of their own race
on television, while Latino and Asian children were much less
likely to see their race represented.
Across all races, children are more likely to associate positive
characteristics with white characters and negative
characteristics
with minority characters. "A Different World: Children's
Perceptions of Race and Class in the Media" reported that
"children of all races agree that the news media tend to portray
African-American and Latino people more negatively than white and
Asian people, particularly when the news is about young people."
In addition, "large majorities of African-American (71 percent),
Latino (63 percent) and Asian (51 percent) children feel there
should be more people of their race as newscasters, while most
white children feel there are enough white newscasters (76
percent)."
Again, there was a virtually complete news media white-out of
this
critical finding. All CNN Newsnight (5/7/98) could say was
that
the study found that children were "influenced by television
news." The Associated Press (5/6/98) did no better.
On a Nightline (5/6/98) program about the study, guests
complained
of disproportionately negative images of people of color.
The
children said they wanted to see television to reflect the
"realities of their lives," to "feature more teenagers," to be
"real," and most importantly, to show more people of all races
interacting with each other. The Nightline guests echoed
this
sense. In response, Nightline host Ted Koppel asked if it was
the
function of the media to present things "as it is or as we think
it should be?"
The children's perception that the news media were the worst
perpetrators of racial stereotyping was mentioned but not really
addressed in the show. Clearly, then, news media are not
presenting things as they are - but rather as racial fears
project
them to be. And a racialized policy agenda is being served.
The
news media's practice of racial profiling gives the news consumer
no real choice: Too often, we don't get the reality of what
really
is, or the dream of what should be, but an imaginary nightmare in
black .
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