Week 7 - What are you reading?

It was on mine, too. Bought it about two years ago and meant to read it immediately - got sidetracked with others, mostly fiction and for whatever reason I picked it up this week and started working through it.

In the introduction, she says that the book isn't for everyone, that the thesis is highly suspect, almost unspeakable (she says her husband even disagrees with it), but for that very reason the book is an immensely powerful, all-encompassing examination of how even when it feels like we are out of the historical woods, our current situation always requires closer attention.

I had a lot of the information she uses in the book to make her case - black and brown men disproportionately arrested and jailed for drum crimes when white men are just as likely to use as sell drugs, sometimes at greater levels; the way these numbers have risen sharply since the end of the old Jim Crow and the enactment of a movement on the right for "law and order" and " a drug-free America" (as if possible); the conscious and subconscious ways we are all conditioned to view the young black man as a threat. These are all things I've heard of, known to be true, but it is with a book like this that an author can lay it all out and make a clear, convincing argument that while something has changed, nothing has changed.

One of the more powerful insights is how it is actually the supposed color-blindness of these political movements, to jail drug users and give them harsh sentences, that makes them so atrocious. We are told that they are jailing drug fiends, so when those drug fiends just happen to be mostly black men, we are supposed to believe that this is because they are doing more drugs and being stupider about it and getting caught.

I'm still 100 pages from the end, but I'm already morally convinced that the movement from suppressing black people has only shifted in a way that gives those who are doing the suppressing more cover - and the more evil notion that the suppression is not even to them a matter of race. They are simply more able, better able to fight the War on Drugs on the poorest communities, with the fewest means to fight back.

It is undoubtedly a very important book and one that could, if given a chance, change the way we talk about race, drugs and moving forward in a real way.

/r/52book Thread Parent