Hacker News Reader

Comment by mieseratte | Hacker News Reader

> It was influential journal that shaped how people got treated and current culture, racial divisions, activism etc etc were influenced by that.

Alternatively, we were already hard on drug addicts and it was reflection of the time. Fast-forward to present day, we've been steadily shifting towards a more reasonable approach towards drugs, slowly but surely.

It's also well established that the black community was for the harsh laws of the crack epidemic, having believed it would help end the crisis by keeping criminals off the streets. In that light, the results start to look more as a result of unintended consequences than some type of modern-day chattel system as implied by present-day activists.

View on HN

> It's also well established that the black community was for the harsh laws of the crack epidemic

What does 'black community' mean here? Is there such a thing as a representative body that speaks for all blacks and this is what they were asking for? Or did people go out and ask a few black people who were felt to be community leaders, or was it done by a survey?

Yep. Acting as if there was one monolithic black community position is extremely problematic.

> The debate leading up to passage of the laws in 1973 was fierce, exposing rifts within the community. Some black lawmakers dismissed Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's black allies as "palace pets." Others, like Brooklyn’s Vander L. Beatty, one of the top black legislators at the time, said the Rockefeller laws didn’t go far enough. He wanted the death penalty.[1]

It's also problematic to equate wanting tougher laws for dealers with wanting tougher laws for simple possession, or the heroin epidemic with the crack epidemic, or New York with America. There is a point to be made that we sometimes have too simplistic a narrative in our heads, but the solution isn't to replace it with another overly simplistic narrative.

[1] https://www.wnyc.org/story/312823-black-leaders-once-champio...

> What does 'black community' mean here?

Leaders of prominent groups that promote / lobby for African-American issues, one would assume.

To be frank, your response reads like a "No True Scotsman" - could I not just write off Black Lives Matter as "Not representative of the black community" then? Who are those activists to say what the real problems are?

The only time there is a more "reasonable" approach is when it is happening in the burbs with prescription pills and "rural" areas. They are still more than willing to lock up "inner city thugs".

Is it more reasonable because it's white folks, or because we've evolved our understanding?

Statistically. Blacks get longer prison sentences for the same crime as Whites.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/black-men-sentenced-time-whi...

They argued also for social services which they did not get. They did argued for tying criminality with blackness either.

Every single thing and act is product of it time in same sense. People have no agency nor choice nor make decisions in such view of world.

20 years old 30 years ago are 50 years old now. The people who were shaped by these things are the ones ruling world now and it influences their reactions to events now. Including reactions to youth activism which is, again, reaction to their policies.

What I am saying is that it is not distant past 2000 years ago, it is recent past very relevant to now.

You're making salient points, but it's being undermined by grammatical errors.

It was never well established the black community asked for harsh punishment. That was only dreamed up by right wing media to justify continued racist criminal justice policies. If someone asks for a glass of water you don’t strap them into a chair, waterboard them, and then say “it’s what you asked for.”

The black community asked for basic policing to be done. What they got was mandatory minimum, 3-strikes laws, escalated drug charges, and stop and frisk.

Those long active activists have got it exactly right. Only conservative media and politicians have created a new narrative of unintended consequences because of how obviously racist their racist policies were being seen.

Nixon’s counsel for domestic affairs, John Erlichman, later said:

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.

IOW the War on Drugs is based solely on an obsolete, sinister political agenda.

I don't dispute the War on Drugs is founded in partisanship and racism. However, it is worth pointing out that it was supported by many, including those from the communities most negatively impacted.

Folks need to stop trying to repaint it as this purely right-wing racist conspiracy and attempting to wield it as some type of political cudgel. We need reform, badly, and attempting to turn this into a wedge is bullshit partisan politics.

> That was only dreamed up by right wing media to justify continued racist criminal justice policies.

From Slate, a left-wing publication:

> Well, in 1973, in New York, many black activists pushed for drug laws, and in the ’80s many black activists pushed for punitive crime policies and supported aspects of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs. When Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law, the one that created the crack-cocaine disparity, Charlie Rangel was onstage with him. And at the time they pushed this because they thought previous policies were not doing the job and that they needed to get tougher on the drug problem in urban communities. And as the drug problem worsened, many of them continued to push for more punitive policies and more aggressive policing.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2016/0...

We are reading different parts of the same article. The interviewee even stressed that the bill they supported was not the one they asked for.

“What is often missed, however, is that most of those black activists and politicians weren’t asking only for toughness. They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand, and better access to healthcare. In the end, they wound up with police and prisons. To say that this was what black people wanted is misleading at best.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-d...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com