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.
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.”
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.