Are drug laws a vestigial white resistance to black criminality?
by Christopher Donovan
The respectable Stuart Taylor, Jr. of the National Journal makes sound points in a recent column about the absurdity of Jena as a rallying point for “civil rights.”
The bigger injustice, he says, are harsh drug laws that put huge numbers of young black males in prison: they account for 40 percent of the 2.2 million people locked up in the United States. Taylor refreshingly acknowledges (referencing a recent column by black Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson) the unavoidable fact that blacks simply commit more crime — significantly more.
But is white “racism” still a factor?
Says Taylor: “The absurdly excessive penalties for possessing or selling crack cocaine could be seen as evidence that many white voters and legislators are subconsciously more willing to throw away the lives of small-time black offenders than small-time white offenders. You can call that racism, but only by stretching the word.””Racism,” of course, is a pejorative term that at times is applied to perfectly legitimate reactions to group difference. But applied thusly to the drug laws, Taylor might have it wrong. It could well be that the overwhelming support for these laws by whites — and the refusal of politicians to change those laws, even Democrats — represents conscious or unconscious white resistance to black criminality.
The American left makes this point, for its own purposes, only to be dismissed by mainstream conservatives who deny “racism” and cite law and order, noting that the laws supposedly punish drug sales and possession, not membership in a race, and if someone volunteers to break those laws, that’s his fault.
And clearly, it does not speak well of black intelligence that despite the harsh sentences, they continue to violate the drug laws in such numbers. A group for whom so many members cannot understand the simple command “don’t do that” does not invite overwhelming sympathy.
But the inquiry doesn’t end there. One might think, plausibly, that a black person who demonstrates impulsiveness and disregard for the law sufficient to run afoul of drug laws would also be inclined toward violence or theft — crimes that would directly affect whites. And even if the drug laws did not originate with “racist” intent, whites’ general observation of their workings (especially sentencing for crack) may underlie their support for the laws as they stand.
In other words, drug laws are seen as a giant filter, catching potentially dangerous blacks in illegal acts that do not directly hurt the white community, but which remove them from the streets before they can do real harm. Who knows how many whites’ safety and property have been spared because of these laws?
This may not be an ideal function of the criminal law. But the problem it reveals is the failure to be honest about the unworkability of black-white (and perhaps Hispanic-white) relations. Whites are justifiably wary of life with blacks, given their demonstrated penchant for crime, as well as other differences. But because they are strictly forbidden from saying so, and in many realms forbidden from legally segregating themselves, they seize with ferocity upon ostensibly race-neutral proxies like drug laws.
There are any number of policies in the United States distorted by unspoken racial incompatibility, such as whites’ reluctance to support welfare in a multiracial society, now confirmed by researchers.
What in fact underlies white support for drug laws is an empirical matter, of course, however much we like to speculate. But a poll might show, albeit circumstantially, that whites who are most enthusiastic about applying the anti-drug laws forcefully are also the same people who are most aware of black crime rates, and, further, are aware that blacks are highly vulnerable to being convicted of drug crimes and incarcerated. One could ask them, as well, about the likely consequences of so many blacks being in jail.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com/authors/Donovan-Incarceration.html
An added twist to the history of enhanced sentencing for crack is the fact that when these laws were passed they were largely a response to demands for action from black activists, many of whom also claimed that the crack epidemic was a planned genocidal action on the part of “white racists.” Black “leaders” are so habituated to crying “racism” that whites are damned no matter what we do.