The people of America may commend the fact that Trent Lott is no longer Senate majority after his indirect praise of segregation. However, we don't realize that Congress condemns racism on the surface; we don't pay attention to the underlying tactics that legalize it. One such tactic is the war on drugs, which has begun to amount to little more than a legitimate way to instill segregation.
Consider a few facts regarding the war on drugs:
- Blacks constitute 13 percent of all drug users, but 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of persons convicted, and 74 percent of people sent to prison
- In 1986, before the enactment of federal mandatory minimum sentencing for crack-cocaine offenses, the average federal drug sentence for African-Americans was 11 percent higher than for whites. Four years later, the average federal drug sentence for African-Americans was 49 percent higher.
- Rates of drug use or drug selling are no greater for members of minorities than for whites, yet minorities are stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, and incarcerated at far greater rates than whites
One heinous example of this injustice occurred in Tulia, Texas. In 1999 drug task force officers raided the black sections of that community and arrested more than ten percent of the town's African-American population. No drugs were found, but the prosecutions continued regardless. This was based on the completely unsupported testimony of a known racist undercover cop who claimed to have purchased drugs from the defendants.
Four of these defendants received extremely different sentences. Joe Moore, a black hog farmer in his late 50's was sentenced to 90 years in prison. Kareem White, a 26 year old African American received a 60 year sentence, his younger sister Kizzie, 25, was sentenced to only 25 years in prison and Cash Love, a white man who fathered one of Kizzie's children, was given a 300 year sentence. This was just a runabout avenue to a legal form of segregation, thinning out the black population, and any white people who actually associated with them, and doing it perfectly legally.
Compare this case to a niece of our wonderful President W. Bush. After numerous offenses involving stealing prescription pills from a nurse's cabinet, to writing false prescriptions for Xanax, up to being caught with what was allegedly crack-cocaine at a drug-rehab center, and receiving a grand total of 13 days in jail.
If Congress has so many people opposing racism, why is this allowed to continue? True society has made many advancements in getting over this pigment fixation, but we still have a long way to go, if it's even a realistic goal to reach a society with truly no racism in it. People in general will always find a ridiculous reason to despise someone else. If it isn't skin color, it's hair color, or eye color, or fingernail length. I'm not saying that racism is the way to go, we should continue to try and overcome it yes, but ridding ourselves of it completely I think is a far fetched idea.
