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

Being from the Bronx, I connected with the arguments presented in “A Synergism of Plagues: “Planned Shrinkage,” Contagious Housing Destruction, and AIDS in the Bronx.” The section of the Bronx labeled “South Bronx,” mentioned as barren, burned out wastelands effected by massive urban decay, I had always remembered as neighborhoods flooded with projects. My father had lived in the same apartment building I grew up in since the late 1970’s in midtown Bronx. He describes the neighborhood as being middle class-Jewish, but that quickly changed by the mid-1980s. One signifier I have to this movement towards northern parts of the Bronx is my mother’s decision to settle there in 1986. South-Central Bronx burnout between 1970-1980 redistributed populations that were once part of overcrowding and within direct causality of the rapid spread of AIDS among injection drug users. A slew of reasons were given within “planned shrinkage” for why this burnout occurred: Landlords seeking to collect insurance money, landlords seeking to get rid of their tenants and concurrently rid of rent-control, meanwhile people on welfare assistance programs who were “burned out” of their homes received a stipend to move, causing many intentional fires. This intention/ unintentional setting fire to the already crumbling housing in the South Bronx rapidly led to its decay.

The racism does not surprise me nor does the use of the War on Drugs as a method for local and state police department to receive excessive funding and military weapons. The federal government has always been able to get the states on board with new policies by either providing or withholding rewards. When the National Minimum Drinking Age Act was passed, states that still allowed people under 21 to purchase alcohol were denied their full federal highway apportionment. I had always been told that the United States had extremely high military spending; it makes perfect sense too when you consider the War on Drugs as a physical war and not a political concept. Despite fact after racial statistic   after fact being spit out in the New Jim Crow, a few things still remain vague to me. If 95% of traffic stops yield no illegal drugs, why do “Operation Pipeline” tactics continue to be used? Don’t the police feel like their exploiting whole communities when they target small-time drug pushers rather than targeting the kingpins? In my opinion it’s a backhanded way to try to increase department profits, willingly allowing the manufacturing and selling of drugs until cops can bust the middleman, confiscate and utilize their profits. The political goals of the War on Drugs are also still vague. Did Reagan intend on stopping manufacturing, use, or just project his political “toughness?”

Still, the War on Drugs proves to be more of a war on people. The repercussion of the War on Drugs—- 80-90% of drug arrests result in the incarceration of people of color.

A couple of things I applaud Michelle Alexander for include stating that marijuana is a drug that is less dangerous than tobacco and alcohol, as well as showing how white communities were seven to eight times more likely to use harder drugs such as cocaine, crack cocaine, and heroin than their African American counterparts.

The sad truth is that unconscious racial bias exists, whether or not we want it to be true. I had an extended conversation with my mother about this last night and she agreed but instead of blaming years of institutionalized concepts she just said that’s just how things are, implying that there’s not much we can do to change the stigmas. Perspectives like this one just continue to frustrate me.

            In the introduction of the New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander draws the parallels between the era of racial prejudice and the current system of discrimination against criminals. All of the sectors of living in which Jim Crow Laws had made it perfectly legal to discriminate against African Americans, are now the same rights denied to labeled felons. Perhaps Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the War on Drugs, the emersion of crack cocaine, alongside the saturation media with images of black crack whores, dealers, and babies seem like the perfect ingredients for a conspiracy theory, what remains factual is the resulting drastic increase in arrests and convictions for drug charges.

The conspiracy lived on within music in the recent years after the Ronald Reagan Era.

“Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares? One less hungry mouth on the welfare, First ship ’em dope and let ’em deal to brothers.” -2pac

 

            Given the statistic that one in three young African American men are either in prison, on probation, or parole doesn’t come off as a surprise as a New Yorker.  In this city we tend to identify a neighborhood with heavier police patrolling as a neighborhood with a higher crime rate rather than a safer neighborhood; but what the New Jim Crow made me reconsider is if this association is just a result of the racial caste system Alexander describes. Since these neighborhoods tend to be mainly minority ethnic populations, it is easy to see the prevalence of a racial caste system.

            The Rebirth of Caste applies a timeline from the system of indentured servitude to the transition of the enslavement of people shipped directly from Africa (since slaves from the West Indies were more likely to know English and identify with rebellion causes, e.g. Bacon’s rebellion), to the black codes, brief Reconstruction era, Jim Crow Era, to mass incarceration. Political language has adopted using coded racial terms, however, the blunt discrimination remains. Even if recent laws were written to satisfy our “colorblind” society and claim to be race-neutral, still 90% of prisoners arrested for drug offenses are black or Latino. Ultimately, the New Jim Crow forces us to stop and think about the aspect of our justice system that we all just admit to and shrug off; that sometimes the justice system can be distorted; that racial profiling exists; even with police brutality, stop and frisk, we just accept it as a facet of the system, even if it angers most of us. The New Jim Crow offers the historical explanation of its installation and sheds a new light of knowledge on a part of our society that I previously blindly accepted as just “how it is.”