More Black Men Now in Prison System Than Were Enslaved

From AlterNet:

“Most of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,” she said, even though studies have shown that whites use and sell illegal drugs at rates equal to or above blacks. In some black inner-city communities, four of five black youth can expect to be caught up in the criminal justice system during their lifetimes.

As a consequence, a great many black men are disenfranchised, said Alexander — prevented because of their felony convictions from voting and from living in public housing, discriminated in hiring, excluded from juries, and denied educational opportunities.

“What do we expect them to do?” she asked, who researched her ground-breaking book while serving as Director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. “Well, seventy percent return to prison within two years, that’s what they do.”

More here.

In a somewhat related development, there are also now more enslaved people in the world than at any other time in human history.

This stinks. Bad. If we lived in a functioning democracy, with functional social institutions, like an actual free press, this news would be dominating the headlines week after week, month after month. Instead, it just languishes on the back burner, drying up like Langston Hughes' "raisin in the sun," waiting for that day when it becomes too much to bear, that day Hughes predicted when it will "explode." Hughes was, of course, writing about another era, the era of Jim Crow and the segregated South, the era of festering ghettos in the North, the era when a black man was an invisible man.

But that's exactly the point: what good have these last fifty years of civil rights advancement done us? Yes, segregation is now illegal, in theory, and we have an African-American man occupying the Oval Office, but so what? Black schools are still black schools, struggling against social and economic impediments with which white schools don't have to deal, but held to the same standard, anyway. And yes, a relative few people with dark skin have moved into positions of political and economic importance, but a very large percentage of black Americans continue to be oppressed by poverty and police.

And official America doesn't give a shit.

I'm totally horrified when I think about all this. The American myth that we've all been taught in the schools is that we did away with this racist shit long ago, that Lincoln freed the slaves, that Martin Luther King forced the white power structure to concede on Southern apartheid, that we all lived happily ever after because America is the greatest fucking country in the world. But it's all bullshit. We didn't live happily ever after. The black man has been forced back into servitude by another name. And America is not the greatest country in the world.

Things continue to get worse, not better.

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