As a practical matter, I don't think the US was ever in favour of locking a bunch of people up, destroying lives for nothing and the uncomfortably racial nature of where the hammer fell. They could have used methods to deal with drugs that worked. Even if the conscious plan is to vote for a chimera, it still makes sense to vote for one that implements good long-term policies as well as bowing to short term expediency.
If the policies as-implemented are so bad that he feels a need to pardon people for being charged under them, I can see why some people would be apoplectic at this bald-faced ploy. After some number of lives ruined by bad policy making, really these politicians should just resign. Although, again, I do think most people are making a show about it fright now are doing so for political reasons; there aren't a lot of people out there who care about principle. Any of the last 10 presidents would have done the same under similar circumstances.
I think you're giving mid-century Americans too much credit. I think they were widely ignorant of Black history and racial issues and really had no concept of institutional racism--of which the War on Drugs was certainly a scion. Crime--and let's consider all its racializations--was also pretty bad, and voters across races and political lines are generally in favor of full on human rights violations to get it under control [0].
[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/16/212620886...
If you want to see a whole lot of people act truly apoplectic at a ploy, then just watch the MAGA mob's reaction to the earth-shattering fact that a fictional cartoon character named "Velma" finally came out as lesbian.
The left's reaction:
Fans cheer as Velma is shown crushing on a woman in the new Scooby-Doo movie:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05/1126838591/velma-lesbian-scoo...
The right's reaction:
Conservatives Are Now Freaking Out About [Spins Wheel] a Lesbian in ‘Scooby Doo’. The classic cartoon's Halloween special portrays Velma as queer, and right-wing pundits can't cope:
https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/conservatives-now-freaking-...
FOX News Goes Through the Motions Proclaiming 'Scooby Doo' is Woke Because Velma is Gay:
https://www.thebiglead.com/posts/fox-news-scooby-doo-velma-g...
Fox guest loses his mind over Scooby Doo’s Velma being gay & compares it to bestiality. He told Laura Ingraham that Velma being gay is "really offensive" to him because it "sexualizes" her.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/10/fox-guest-loses-mind-sco...
If the racists want to hide behind a war on drugs, they obviously don't think they have the numbers to carry racist policy. This undermines this idea that the voters wanted the policies that were implemented.
It goes without saying that Black people aren’t inherently more likely to be drug dealers or drug users—there is no intrinsic connection between drugs and race. Prohibitions might have a disparate impact on them, but for reasons (discriminatory policing, etc.) that would apply to any prohibition. There’s lots of other laws that have discriminatory enforcement, but nobody accuses the proponents of those laws of being motivated by racism.
“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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. 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.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-rea...
Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist Conversation With Richard Nixon
In newly unearthed audio, the then–California governor disparaged African delegates to the United Nations.
The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States.
“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.
“As you can imagine,” Nixon confided in Rogers, “there’s strong feeling that we just shouldn’t, as [Reagan] said, he saw these, as he said, he saw these—” Nixon stammered, choosing his words carefully—“these, uh, these cannibals on television last night, and he says, ‘Christ, they weren’t even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,’ and so forth and so on.”
The president wanted his patrician secretary of state to understand that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to. “You know, but that’s typical of a reaction, which is probably”—“That’s right,” Rogers interjected—“quite strong.”
Nixon couldn’t stop retelling his version of what Reagan had said. Oddly unfocused, he spoke with Rogers again two hours later and repeated the story as if it would be new to the secretary.
“Reagan called me last night,” Nixon said, “and I didn’t talk to him until this morning, but he is, of course, outraged. And I found out what outraged him, and I find this is typical of a lot of people: They saw it on television and, he said, ‘These cannibals jumping up and down and all that.’ And apparently it was a pretty grotesque picture.” Like Nixon, Rogers had not seen the televised images. But Rogers agreed: “Apparently, it was a terrible scene.” Nixon added, “And they cheered.”
Then Nixon said, “He practically got sick at his stomach, and that’s why he called. And he said, ‘It was a terrible scene.’ And that sort of thing will have an emotional effect on people … as [Reagan] said, ‘This bunch of people who don’t even wear shoes yet, to be kicking the United States in the teeth’ … It was a terrible thing, they thought.”
You can hear similar conversations openly in many parts of the world, especially Asia. Those countries often also tend to have harsh drug laws. But the two things are uncorrelated, given that those countries don’t have a significant domestic population of minorities that would justify drug prohibition as a pretext for cracking down on minorities.
The irony of all this is that recreational drug use is “Stuff White People Like.” Around the world, other than certain traditional plants, social acceptability and legalization of drug use is disproportionately something practiced in societies run by white people. Reading Donald Harris’s remarks about Kamala Harris impugning the dignity of Jamaicans by attempting to associate them with marijuana use is instructive.
That's a very popular quote, but it's not as slam dunk as you think. The veracity of the quote has been challenged. It was allegedly obtained 26 years after the nixon campaign, and was only published 22 years after that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote
The outcomes however are a matter of historical record. Jails filled to the brim with black people. Even though white people deal drugs and use drugs at a higher rate than black people. You don't even need that quote to see what Nixon quickly "achieved".
And we also know Nixon was a racist. That's on tape. Referring to Jamaica:
“Blacks can’t run it. Nowhere, and they won’t be able to for a hundred years, and maybe not for a thousand ... Do you know, maybe one black country that’s well run?”
-- Richard Nixon
Q: How many police officers does it take to kick a hippie down stairwell?
A: None, he just fell!
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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. 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.
-- Former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman
> The PM’s cabinet in my home country
The drug war didn't start in your country, so you have no claim to what the initial and subsequent motivations were of those who started it and popularized it around the world.
> It goes without saying that Black people aren’t inherently more likely to be drug dealers or drug users
Black people in the US are less likely to be drug dealers, however they are searched and arrested at a much higher rate.
> There’s lots of other laws that have discriminatory enforcement, but nobody accuses the proponents of those laws of being motivated by racism.
Sure they do. Just as one example, the law that felons cannot vote has frequently been cited as racially motivated. Another example is stop and frisk.
Yes, and those accusations are stupid because e.g. the prohibition on felons voting in most states dates to before the civil war when most Black people couldn't vote. Iowa had some of the strongest felony voting rules in the country, which it adopted in 1846 when it had virtually no Black people.
Gun control laws were originally adopted to disarm Black people. Felon-in-possession and red flag laws disproportionately affect Black men. Do you go around calling contemporary proponents of gun control motivated by racism?
A major justification for abortion in the early 20th century was limiting the birth rate of minorities and poor people. Do you accuse abortion advocates of being motivated by racism?
No, you don’t because you recognize that there are independent reasons for those policies even if some advocates of those policies have (or had in the past) racist motivations.
Your original claim was "nobody accuses the proponents of those laws of being motivated by racism.". You were wrong. Now you are moving the goalposts.
> Do you accuse abortion advocates of being motivated by racism?
That is indeed something that conservatives accuse pro-choice people of quite often.
In all these cases you need to look at:
1. How recent the original motivations were and if they are still in place.
2. Outcomes.
In the case of the drug war, the motivations were recent and include several modern presidents from both sides of the aisle. Starting with Nixon but including Reagan and Bill Clinton.
And the outcome is jails filled with black people arrested on drug charges when the reality is that white people in the US both deal drugs and use drugs at a higher rate than black people.
With abortions you neither have recency or outcomes. The black population in the US is growing at a healthy rate. In fact, the black population in the US is young. Over a third of the U.S. Black population was 22 years or younger in 2019.
> you recognize that there are independent reasons for those policies
A policy can be motivated by both racism and other reasons. They aren't exclusive.
The phrase “those laws” refers to the immediately preceding “lots of other laws.” Not “all other laws.” The point is that people are selective about whether they throw around accusations of racism when a law has discriminatory impacts. Not that they allege racism only with respect to the drug war.
As to conservatives making accusations that abortion is racist, they’re dumb and wrong.
But the discriminatory impact of abortion on Black people is undeniable. According to Guttmacher, the Black abortion rate is five times higher than the white abortion rate. Black population growth as a percentage of the population has been stagnant for decades. That will directly lead to loss of Black political power as Hispanics have overtaken them as the largest minority group, and soon Asians will overtake them as well.
And the recency is there too. People point to the things Nixon said about the drug war. But read about Nixon’s Population Control Commission!
Of course they are. Not all discriminatory laws were put into place by racists like Nixon.
> the Black abortion rate is five times higher than the white abortion rate.
So what? The birth rate for black people is higher than the birth rate for white people. And the birth rate for Hispanic people in the US is barely higher than that for black people. Birth rate is what matters. Abortion rates are almost meaningless.
> as Hispanics have overtaken them as the largest minority group
Due to immigration... not birth rates. You're doing such a poor job with data and logic that I'm not getting anything out of this. I'm stopping here.
I thought the theory was that white people were generally racists?
> So what? The birth rate for black people is higher than the birth rate for white people.
So what is that most Black people themselves don’t think that an abortion is an inconsequential event. They are the reason for Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” messaging. They might support its legality, but many still think it’s killing a human life. When that happens five times as much to Black women as white women, that’s a significant burden.
> Due to immigration... not birth rates.
Hispanics have both immigration and higher birth rates. And if abortion rates between whites and blacks were equal, higher birth rates would offset both.
It's a particularly brazen stroke of message-boardiness to put words in the mouth of someone who just rebutted your first-principles argument with evidence.
If you've decided to carry the flag of "the drug war is, contrary to popular belief, not racist" --- and I fully respect your prerogative to do that --- you should at least come prepared to knock down a bit of evidence so popular it was featured on Adam Ruins Everything. There are other easy-pickings facts to whack your argument with; for instance, you can just search AskHistorians, where this has been covered (hint: I'm pretty sure you're wrong.)
Just for fun:
https://www.nytimes.com/1914/02/08/archives/negro-cocaine-fi...
(AskHistorians is really great).
It’s possible that the drug war is caused by racism in the US, and by entirely different reasons in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nigeria, Japan, or China, or Russia. But the cited “evidence” hardly suffices to establish that.
“Historians” are, as a general matter, terrible at describing why things happen. They’re not data analyzers, they’re story tellers. The same few anecdotes from people in Nixon’s orbit get spun out to explain a decades-long social phenomenon. But was Nixon in Japan and all those other places that have drug wars?
The drug war happened because America is a rigidly moralistic society, just like Japan, and such societies almost uniformly condemn drug use as a moral failing. Nixon also happened to be racist, and a hallmark of racism is the tendency to attribute immorality and lack of character to out groups. But that’s not causation.
Did you take a second to search AskHistorians about this issue? There's a bunch more stuff like this, not just in the 1970s.
That reductive. Things can happen for multiple reasons.
> Nixon also happened to be racist... But that’s not causation.
Sure it is. If you are racist and you do things that have a racist outcome, it's racism. What kind of mental hoops are you jumping through to get to some other conclusion?
Like the people who defend Eric S Raymond's racist edge lord bullshit because they think he's just trying to show off how clever he is to say manifestly racist shit to provoke people and then trying to talk his way out of it by accusing everyone of being less intelligent and open minded than he is.
That's a sweeping generalization; it's not a rebuttal if the cancers in question have multiple causative factors — as you seem implicitly to acknowledge in your very-next paragraph about "entirely-different reasons" ....
> “Historians” are, as a general matter, terrible at describing why things happen. They’re not data analyzers, they’re story tellers.
Really? "I usually don't agree with historians' explanation of why things happen" is not an acceptable definition of "terrible."
(Oh, and as I'm sure you know professionally: Story-telling is often the best way to communicate a message.)
So you admit there is broad systemic racism, but insist it had absolutely no effect on the motivations of the people who started and supported the War on Drugs, and that it's unfair to call Nixon and Reagan racist, huh?
Then address my response to rayiner above, quoting their very own words recorded on tape, and John Ehrlichman's admission. And don't lie through your teeth.
I don't need to prove my anti-racist bona fides to you or anyone else.
As should be obvious from my comment, I am very much against the so-called war on drugs, and thinks it's awful in many ways, including in racist ways. However, I also don't think it would have gotten the support it did in early days unless many people, even the majority of people involved, had not felt that they were actually addressing a real problem with the sale and use of drugs. In addition, I don't think it's helpful to describe it in terms that put everybody into one of two buckets, where the only two choices are "be okay with any and all drugs" and "racist."
That drug policy in the US is horrifically racist, and has been since even before the so-called "war on drugs" began is clear. But the way out is not to pretend that the only basis for the policy from anyone, ever, is racism.
If you want to feel morally superior enough to call people you don't know on the internet liars, then go ahead. But you will probably fail to convince anyone not already convinced.
To be honest, I have no clue, maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but also maybe that's not anything they predicted or thought to consider as second order effects in their opinion at the time.
People's personal opinion are not always hours of deep analysis, reflections and evaluation. Often times, simplistic solutions win an opinion, I can very well see something as simplistic as: these drugs are a problem, let's make them all illegal and attach prison sentences to the sale and possession, problem solved! And a lot of people at the time, fearful of those drugs, not knowing much about them, and hearing what they do to people and who generally consumes them, just feeling like that's a great idea and being onboard with the policy.
And now, people have seen those second order effect first hand, they've also learned more about those drugs, their nature, don't fear it as much, and so are now of a different opinion.
And similarly now the opinion of the people has shifted, so the government representatives are adopting policies that match up with today's opinion.
I'm not saying this to defend any particular person you referenced, just that the logic of saying that in the past someone was against something and now they're for it isn't necessarily hypocrisy, or false pretense. If the opinion of the people they represent also changed and at both times were respected, that seems to be a great example of a functioning republic no?