The thought that kept circulating uncomfortably through my head while I was reading chapters 2 and 3 of The New Jim Crow was, “Crap, someone actually thinks this is a good way to run a country.” There are lots of people, both elected and not (e.g. corporate heads), who hold and have held (over decades and centuries) considerable social power who apparently believe/believed that racialized social control is a workable and desirable plan. What’s terrifying is that those people have collected the political, social, economic, and military capital to make their vision a reality. After reading this section of the book, I still do not understand (and honestly don’t particularly care to understand) why exactly people like Nixon believed in the War on Drugs and how they obtained the power to implement it. I’m talking about psycho-social processes here–people do things for reasons, so what were their reasons? The trouble is, I suspect those reasons are not possible to understand if you don’t agree with them.
Related reading on the NYPD for anyone who’s interested (I’m sure many of you have already seen this): http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/9-frightening-things-about-americas-biggest-police-force
