The planned disruption of the black community

John Ehrlichman - scheming of you

     The struggle of African-Americans is a topic that is seemingly often discussed, but, at the same time, never fully discussed.  A recent anecdote reveals this hidden aspect to the story of black people in America – we live with the results of what happen today.

     John Ehrlichman was a White House Domestic Affairs Advisor to Pres. Richard Nixon.  In conversations with author Dan Baum he 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."

     So how has this played out?  Let’s look at the logic conclusion of going after these two “enemies” – prison sentencing.  How better to disrupt the black community?  So, with 5% of the world’s population, the US has 25% of the world’s prisoners, over 2 million people.  And of those, about half are in for drug offences (with 11% in for violent crime).

     37% of those 2 million prisoners are black.  12.3% of the general US population is black.

     In politics there is the concept of electoral capture:

[T]hose circumstances when the group has no choice but to remain in the party.  The opposing party does not want the group's vote, so the group cannot threaten it's party leaders with defection.  The party leadership, then, can take the group for granted because it recognizes that short of abstention or an independent (and usually electoral suicide) third party, the group has nowhere else to go.

     As Anna O. Law writes, political scientist Paul Frymer created this concept to describe the “two party system in the U.S. [which] allows the Democratic Party to blow off the concerns of African Americans who are a numerical minority in order to appeal to moderate white voters who will help them win elections”. 

     Not only are the drug-war cards stacked against black people in the US, but their free population is captured politically.  Their voice doesn’t matter to the Democratic Party, which is predominantly their choice.  And then, cruelly, literally, such a large proportion of their population is captured in prisons.  Nixon’s plan has worked.