The K-K-Kase for Barack Obama

By On September 10, 2012 · 13 Comments · In Current Events

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.

 

 
  • good_in_theory

    Where do BHLs tend to stand on the law and order, tough on crime, prison industrial complex view outside of the drug war? Obviously the bad laws shouldn’t be enforced, but should good laws be enforced the way they are often currently enforced – that is the more procedural parts of the criminal code (I’m thinking of things like 3 strikes, mandatory sentencing, trying minors as adults, and the general “throw the book at them and I hope they get raped in prison” take on things)?

    My impression of local elections for DAs and judges and such always suggests to me that there is a deep popular appeal to a harsh criminal justice system. It’s an ugly quality of our democracy that often seems to cross party lines.

    • Sean II

      It doesn’t just cross party lines, it crosses racial lines. I live in a very segregated high-crime city, and despite deep suspicion of the police, the black community here is steeped in law-and-order fanaticism (made shockingly conspicuous by the absence of that polite code language whites use when talking about crime).

      It’s a really strange thing to behold. Little old ladies who lost sons and husbands and fathers to prison can tell you heartbreaking tales of injustice about whole lives that were ruined because of an irrational sentence for car theft back in 1982. But when the old churchman gets up at a community meeting and says that boys with “sagging drawers” should be publicly caned because of something written in Deuteronomy, the place goes crazy with shouts of agreement and applause.

      That’s when I learned that life in the ‘hood is all about fear. It really is exactly like you see in “The Wire”. When people aren’t busy being scared of the cops, they’re losing sleep in fear of the local young men.

      I once hoped that ending the drug war would go most of the way to fixing both problems. But you’re dead right: nothing would be more tragic than if we let America’s weed smokers go in peace, only to keep sending people into rape factories for stealing cell phones and TVs. Because once the battle for legal marijuana is over, whatever is left of popular opposition to the drug war and the moral panic over crime will be too small to do anything.

      • good_in_theory

        Exactly. That’s why I’m curious how BHLs approach ‘law and order’ policy when dealing with the ‘just’ laws. A certain kind of libertarian seems to be fully for the “if they broke they law, they deserve whatever they get” school of thought. How does the issue play out within Libertarianism? Harmless crimes and due process concerns seem solidly libertarian, but when it comes to rehabilitation vs punishment, I see a question mark.

        • Ethan Pooley (furball4)

          Among libertarians it is common to see a much greater role for restitution, and a greater consideration of the costs of each approach. Incarceration has the highest cost imaginable. You remove someone’s entire productivity from society, twice over (because you have to support them now), you hamstring their ability to pay restitution, you sever their social connections to many people who will suffer equally despite having committed no crime, you replace those connections with ones to other offenders, you create and feed an incarceration industry/lobby… the list goes on and on. It rarely makes practical sense to incarcerate for anything non-violent.

          The problem with criminal response in the U.S. is that it has been running on auto-pilot for ages – no one even realizes it has premises that can be questioned. If someone perpetrates a violent mugging, we just figure they’ll get a few years (they won’t – not yet – but that’s another issue). But do a few years of incarceration make any sense at all? If the purpose is protection of the public, how will that justification disappear after three years of consorting with other offenders and the ruin of whatever livelihood the offender might have had going in? And if it’s the punishment aspect that is supposed to deter future offenses, surely we can find something less expensive?

          What makes much more sense is punitive restitution combined with intensified scrutiny of the offender: electronic tracking, house/work arrest, etc. If we truly believe that they will re-offend, despite scrutiny that severely limits their hopes of hiding such an offense, then we need to lock them up forever – not for just three years. I’m speaking logically here, and not trying to suggest a complete criminal justice theory in one go. But that’s what is missing today – people aren’t asking “Why do we do this? Why this sentence? Why this system? Is it a good deal? Does it work? What are our goals? Does it make any sense?”

      • TracyW

        I grew up in a part of my home-town where the socio-economic mix was falling and the burglary rate very high (though far from the level of US inner-cities in the 1980s) but went to a high school that mostly drew on a far more upper-class catchment area.

        The differences in attitudes between my school friends and my neighbours was striking. The first time we were burgled, the fire poker was left on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, implying the burglar had picked it up and walked through the house to see if anyone was home. After that, my parents went through a variety of burglar alarms, winding up with one tied to a security monitoring service, that was so loud that when it went off your only thought was to stop the noise or escape it as fast as possible. That did the job in terms of preventing burglaries, but my parents also wound up upgrading the locks after the damage done by people jimmying open the doors (before fleeing the alarm). And once we came home to find signs of an attempted burglary and the dog cowering underneath the house, horrible people must have scared the dog badly, totally unnecessary as she was a corgi-sized mutt who lived by the saying “a stranger is only a friend I haven’t met yet” and would have helped them move the stuff out given half a chance. This sort of ongoing occurrences was quite normal in my neighbourhood, often people would move away after being repeatedly burgled. My school friends were nagged by their parents to lock the doors, and perhaps the more paranoid sort had alarms installed, but burglary was a rarity in their lives.

      • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

        Sean,
        As you may have noticed, I generally agree with your line of thinking. And, I certainly agree that the drug war is a horrible mistake. But I question how many criminals get sent to the “rape factories” for a first-time offense like stealing a cell phone. Do you have any stats on how many people are sentenced to time in a medium or max. security prison for a first time offense involving a minor property crime, particularly one not committed by pulling a gun on someone?

        • Sean II

          I’m not saying it’s some huge number, but from what I’ve seen (which is a lot, although only in one city) there’s a truly crazy randomness to it all.

          You might have a guy with 17 felony arrests and 4 convictions, including 2 robberies and 2 burglaries. He’s walking the street, in part because he’s an experienced bad guy who knew how to get his most recent robbery pleaded down to “aggressive begging”, which is just a bullshit city charge.

          The next day you turn around and there’s a kid who snatched some rims from a garage, but he gets charged with stealing over $XXX amount and also they find a couple crack rocks in his pocket. But he does this in a suburb with a different judge, and in any case he’s just a punk who doesn’t know the ropes, so now he’s doing 7 years.

          I’m telling you…it just makes you sick to watch this stuff happen. You talk about inequality – this is what it looks like. Not even from race to race, not even from one statistical category to another, but just brutal inequality between one individual and another.

          The solution – apart from ending the drug war so there aren’t many thieves left – would be to re-localize policing and get some celerity back into the system. You steal something and get caught, you can choose a trial or a take a quick misdemeanor plea with 90 days or whatever. And when you come out, you’re not branded for life.

          At least, that’s one solution that occurs to me. I’m not sure anyone really knows much, beyond the certainty that our current system sucks in almost every way its possible to imagine.

      • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

        The presence of a “law and order mentality” in the larger community is partially a reaction against the 1960′s-1970′s. to those of us who remember, they were frightening times in which weak judges and alternate ideas of law enforcement caused many violent and dangerous repeat offenders to routinely go free. This was reflected in popular culture with movies like Death Wish, and Dirty Harry. And reached it’s apotheosis with Bernard Goetz the subway vigilante, who was applauded by many people.

        I say all of this in orcer to point out that there are consequences to all actions. Often the pendulum swings and a happy medium is hard to find.

  • Jerome Solanum

    From the Michelle Alexander article:
    “more African Americans are in prison right now than were enslaved in 1850″
    This seems a bit disingenuous to me. The 1850 Census, incidentally the first census to attempt to count slaves, determined there were 3,204,313 slaves in the country at that time. According to the 2010 Census, 38.9 million people in the US identified as Black.

    • <3math

      1 in 10 (the ratio of jailed African Americans today) of 38.9 million (the number of African Americans in the US) is 3.89 million which is higher than 3.2 million, which therefore leads to the conclusion that there are more African Americans in jail today than were enslaved in 1850.

      • purple_platypus

        I think you missed the point of Jerome’s post. He’s not saying that statistic is wrong, he’s saying it’s misleading (or at least that’s what he *should* be saying!). The 3.89 million are taken from a MUCH larger population than the 3.2 million, so it’s not a fair comparison.

        • Sean II

          Quite apart from the comparison with slavery, there’s something wrong with those numbers. Where did anyone get 3.89 million for blacks in prison/jail? The actual number is less than one million at any given time, meaning more like 1 in 20.

          That must have been intended to read “prison, jail, probation, and parole”, because otherwise it makes no sense.

  • Sean II

    It’s a shame this post is being overlooked in the BHL news cycle. The topic deserves a 100-comment thread, not just the 10 or 15 it’ll probably get.

    No faction in American politics gets more talk and less action than blacks. In a sense they have become the victims of their own clockwork reliability at the polls. Either Obama or Clinton could have got caught making a bondage film in the situation room (great title, come to think of it), and remained confident of pulling 90% of the black vote.

    In a corporatist state where favors are bought and traded, black voters are simply not for sale, and unlike the teacher’s union or other similarly reliable blocks, they’re not buying ads either. On paper they seem like a mighty and imposing political machine. They are powerless in fact.

    So what do they get? Just steady trickle of rhetoric, most of which amounts to hints on the order of: “Surely, comrades, you don’t want Jones back!”

    (Come to think of it, there is one thing Obama could do to keep black voters away from the polls. He could come out as an atheist. Because among many things of which the black community has been tragically deprived, one of them is progress in the diversity of opinion. The mental atmosphere of the inner city is one of stifling religiosity, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, with fiercely traditional morality, one-party politics, etc. In other words, it’s pretty much like Arkansas under Orval Faubus’s only with the racism removed.)