Current Events
The K-K-Kase for Barack Obama
If you are a KKK member, you probably don’t support Barack Obama. After all, he’s black, and you hate black people. However, in this post, I hope to convince you that voting for Obama is a good way to express your hatred. Of course, if you hate black people and want them to suffer, you could surely do better than Obama. Maybe Romney would be a better bet, even. Yet, no matter how the election goes, it won’t go in a way that benefits blacks. Rejoice!
I don’t have space to cover all the ways Obama hurts black people. Today, I’ll just focus on a few issues.
Let’s start by considering the drug war. Obama has been a fierce drug warrior. I quote from Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know:
Imagine an evil demon wanted to wage war on African Americans. Imagine it wanted to turn black neighborhoods to ghettos, to destroy families, to increase violent crime, and to impoverish their children. Imagine it also wanted to turn the police against the people, to make people live in fear of home raids. Now, because the demon is diabolical, imagine it wanted to have all this happen in the name of compassion and tough love. How might the demon do all this? …one good way would be to invent the American War on Drugs.
Libertarians admit that if drugs are legal, many lives will be destroyed. But, they say, because we make drugs illegal, many more lives are being destroyed.
… Civil liberties columnist Glenn Greenwald says the government “destroys the lives of individuals that proponents of the drug war are trying to help. What is it we do to those we are trying to help? We take them and charge them with crimes. We turn them into felons which…renders them unemployable. We put them into cages for many years, and keep them away from their children and families.” We not do this equally, Greenwald adds. White kids use and sell drugs more than black kids, but the black kids are more likely to go to jail.
Read Michelle Alexander on this here. In Libertarianism, I cite her when discussing mass incarceration.
More than in 1 in 100 American adults is in jail. For African Americans and working-class whites, the number is about 1 in 10. Law professor Michelle Alexander says more African Americans are in prison right now than were enslaved in 1850. The United States imprisons more people than China, though China has four times the US population. Libertarians find it ironic that the so-called land of the free puts so many behind bars.
Alexander says (and you should read the whole thing, not just this excerpt):
The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80 percent of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.
The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s—the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war—nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.
In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time—a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.
Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers—not to mention president of the United States—causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come.
Also, read this paper about how mass incarceration disproportionately harms black women: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00022
The Huffington Post claims Obama will seek to scale down the drug war in his second term. Yeah, sure, and maybe he’ll close Guantanamo, too. He’s been in charge of the DEA for four years. If he genuinely wanted to stop it from hurting blacks, he would have already done so. (You might say he didn’t want to hurt his re-election chances, but isn’t it much more important to stop hurting poor black Americans through the War on Drugs than to be re-elected?)
Obama also supports minimum wage increases. Quoting from Libertarianism again:
The economists William Evan and David Macpherson argue minimum wage laws hurt poor African Americans more than they hurt poor whites. Consider the least skilled group of workers: 16-to-24 year-olds who lack a high school diploma. Evan and Macpherson argue that increasing the minimum wage by 10 percent tends to cause about 2.5% drop in employment for white male in this demographic. However, it tends to cause a 6.5% drop in employment for black males.
These last four years have been especially bad for blacks, too. Here I quote Catherine Rampell at the New York Times:
The real median annual household income for blacks fell 11.1 percent from June 2009 to June 2012, landing at $32,498 from $36,567. That compares with 5.2 percent for whites, 3.6 percent for other race combinations (including Asians) and 4.1 percent for Hispanics — all of whom started with higher incomes than blacks.
However, you might blame this on Bush, rather than Obama. But at the very least, Obama hasn’t fixed the problem, and it doesn’t look like he’s going to do so.