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.)
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.