Michelle Alexander: The Age of Obama as a Racial Nightmare

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure — the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

A very good article by Michelle Alexander. She focuses on the “war on drugs” as the main ‘tool’ for creating and maintaining the racial “undercaste”, as she calls it.

I think we should be careful to the extent we blame racism for this — and I’m certainly not saying that’s Alexander’s argument (it could be, I haven’t read her book, yet) — because while there’s a very clear racial divide I don’t think it’s maintained because of white racism toward blacks.

Maybe that’s what started it, but there are a whole load of other social, economic, and historical factors at work here.

I can’t remember his exact phrasing, but Noam Chomsky has said that the “war on drugs” was intended to remove what was basically a ‘surplus’ population. This has been achieved very effectively, both by direct physical removal and by revoking people’s civil rights. (And created a multi-billion dollar prison industry, too.)

The system has managed to politically, economically, and socially neuter a whole section of the population that was incredibly active as a campaigning force in the 1950s and ’60s.

(via Instapaper)