Dr. Anthony Bradley ― Mass Incarceration: The New Eugenics?

The  United States currently has over 2.3 million prisoners incarcerated in federal, state, and local jails around the country. According to an April report by the Sentencing Project, that number presents a 500 percent increase in incarcerations over the past 40 years.

 This increase produces "prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system" despite the evidence that incarceration is not working. How did this happen? The culprit is usually identified as the failed policies associated with the War on Drugs. Because blacks are disproportionately swept up in the campaign against drugs, some scholars refer to the results of mass incarceration as the new "The New Jim Crow." While the original intentions may have been well-meaning the long-term consequences may be worse: The War on Drugs may actually be class-based eugenics by another name.

Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/mass-incarceration-the-new-eugenics-119383/

John McWhorter — Start a Revolution Against the War on Drugs

via The New York Times:

The idea of a “New Civil Rights Movement” is hopeless. The civil rights revolution was due not only to relentless effort, but a confluence of factors that made them bear fruit in a way they hadn’t for centuries before. Amid the Cold War, segregation was embarrassing as P.R. Restrictions on immigration since the 1920s had made it easier to draw focus to black people. Television was new. Republicans were chastened after Barry Goldwater’s defeat.

There is nothing equivalent today. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to sit still; we just need to narrow our focus. Any uptick in “revolutionary” ideas among blacks in our moment is founded largely in what happened to Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford last year, and it is on the prevalence of such cases that we must indeed focus. The poisonous relationship between black men and police forces is the key to why we never really get past race.

 Racism expresses itself in other ways, but no cognitively resilient group of people feels “oppressed” in a day to day sense by wealth gaps or dumb things people can say. A world with no racism at all would be like a world without dirt, and playing fields -- made of dirt -- are never perfectly level. Few black people would deny any of that.

Read complete article here