You keep repeating this argument. Its premise is invalid. It was not in fact black politicians that raised the sentences for crack cocaine in relation to powder cocaine; it was the overwhelmingly white US federal legislature.

That's... completely irrelevant. The harsher sentences had wide support from black leaders and politicians.

It's obviously not completely irrelevant, as your argument depends on a causal link between black support for crack sentencing laws and the adoption of those laws. In fact, no such causality is established, and it is indeed unlikely, given that the laws were passed by an overwhelmingly white legislature in the grip of a nationwide (largely unjustified) freakout about crime.

John Pfaff's "Locked In" is a great source for the background on this stuff (Pfaff would be the first to say that drug sentencing laws are not the reason for mass incarceration in the US, but that's not the question at issue in this thread).

And white politicions supported harsher sentences in the past as well. Do they speak for us today? Did they speak for everyone back then? Last I checked you only needed a simple majority to get elected.

> If this were a group of white politicians... we'd be hearing a debate on the merits of the proposal.

You can't know that.

When was the last time white community leaders and politicians proposed a policy to address a problem in their own neighborhood and were accused of institutional racism?