One of Nixon's top guys explicitly admitted that the motivation was racism: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

    "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Per the grandparent, yes "marijuana and crack prosecution" have explicitly racist elements.

Specifically, the 1930s anti-cannabis is specifically anti-Hispanic, and the question of why there are massively different sentencing laws around crack and powder cocaine seems to me and most of the people I know to have many obvious racial elements.

I love this comment. This is one area where I think crying racism is actually justified.

Racism is thrown around as a justification for anything today, but _real_ racist policies like:

> different sentencing laws around crack and powder cocaine

That persist today are almost never mentioned.

Another policy that disproportionally effects blacks:

> A mother will receive far more from welfare if she is single than if she has an employed husband in the home.

https://atlantablackstar.com/2014/12/24/ways-war-poverty-des...

> But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. In unison, the rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-wel...

This in particular is discussed at length in Moe Factz https://podcast.app/moe-factz-with-adam-curry-p810825/

An excellent podcast!

One of the US political parties has had their strategists admit that several of their policies are racist, and that their communication strategy foments and encourages racism. This is not news, it's been publicly out there for decades.

> > But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. In unison, the rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today.

Jesus Christ, that is an atrocity. Thank you for digging out that one.

But what I wonder... is this a result of the welfare policy you mentioned, or rather a result of way too many Black fathers ending up in prison, gangs or dead as a result of "selective enforcement" and other abuses of police power?

> Racism is thrown around as a justification for anything today, but _real_ racist policies like: > different sentencing laws around crack and powder cocaine That persist today are almost never mentioned.

There are lots of explicitly racist policies in the US; you can't really understate it. Almost all land use and zoning policies were created out of very explicit racism, as in you can look up anything from city council meeting notes to Supreme Court arguments and they'd just say they did it to keep out black and Chinese people.

Robert Moses built low bridges surrounding NYC to prevent busses from being able to use those roads, and the reason the US has highways running through instead of around cities is literally because the planners wanted an excuse to demolish black neighborhoods. In California it's also the reason there are so many small cities in SF Bay (Palo Alto/EPA and Piedmont/Oakland) and several public parks like in Manhattan Beach.