2014 Shaping the Future of New York Fridays: 11:00-1:45 Boylan Hall, 2231

I kind of liked the contrast in today’s reading as opposed to the gentrification we talked about last week. In the case of gentrification, it can be perceived that there isn’t any initial intent to do harm but in this reading it seems to be the exact opposite. To reduce the amount of fire departments available in an area more prone to fires, if not intentionally harmful, might be one of the dumbest ideas in New York City policy. One of…

Also reducing these services to force people to relocate somehow correlating through the magic of statistics to poor HIV/AIDS prevention and control literally takes away any fighting chance these people have to survive and it’s awful. You can either die in a fire in a poor neighborhood or you can gamble with a disease that will surely lead to your death.

Although I don’t understand it entirely, I find it very interesting and worthy of further investigation to examine how all these seemingly unrelated factors overlap on each other and connect.

It blows my mind how profitable incarcerating people has become in the second half of the 20th century. Local law enforcement agencies in the United States are under a system in which there is financial incentive to round up large amounts of people and incarcerate them for gain. The Edward Byrne Memorial state and local law enforcement assistance program fun law enforcement agencies that follow the drug war agenda and forfeiture laws let law enforcement literally take money out of people’s pockets.

There is also the blatant racism in some of these laws that I actually can’t believe something hasn’t been done about them yet. There is a massive difference in the amount of consent and pretext searches that are done on white people and people of color. People of color are being searched at much higher rates. In a state in which officers can search just about anyone they want, is it really all that strange to see their racial biases exposed through their work?

There’s also the controversy with crack cocaine holders who are predominantly black getting longer sentences  than powder cocaine users who are predominantly white. At all levels of the law, minorities of low socioeconomic status have the short end of the stick. Many even have no choice but to plead guilty because it’s the most socioeconomically feasible thing to do even if they are innocent.

More like No duh!

While appalling, what it is shown in The New Jim Crow is hardly surprising. The United States is a country that decided Segregation was not okay only 60 years ago in 1954 and implemented the thought into society much later. Obviously, the war is not over.

I agree wholeheartedly with Michelle Alexander’s thought on mass incarceration in the United States being the new Jim Crow. I’d even argue that it is worse. There are more black men behind bars or under the watchful eye of the criminal Justice system than there were enslaved in 1850 and those numbers didn’t inflate like that after the start of the war on drugs by accident.

For example, Crenshaw High School in California in a middle class black community lost its accreditation in 2006. A black person can play by all the rules and follow the Horatio Alger script to success: study hard get good grades and once they get their diploma, it doesn’t mean a single thing. Black people can look at things like this happen in society for so long before they can ask what is the rational thing to do? Should I go to school and not get anything out of it or can I get in on this drug dealing business the CIA is pushing to urban citizens?

In a society that praises monetary value is it really a surprise that African-Americans try to attain personal respect the American dream by being a successful drug dealer? This is an economical decision, not a wicked and evil decision. These people aren’t selling drugs because they’re evil, they’re selling drugs so they can survive. Instead of helping offer African Americans other opportunities, they deem them immoral and evil and throw them in jail. Why is that? It’s because the government doesn’t care what happens to the African-Americans. They’d rather have them in jail and never have them vote again. The less African Americans that are capable of voting, the less resistance every year White supremacy has to deal with.