IT’S A MYTH THAT CRACK COCAINE PUNISHMENTS WERE CREATED BY WHITES TO PUNISH BLACKS

From Return of Kings:

It’s time once again to debunk another modern day mythology. This time, it’s a myth about race, rather than gender. And it’s undoubtedly another one you’ve heard before. 

The myth I’m referring to is the idea of disparate impact in 80s anti-drug enforcement: the disparity between punishment of powder cocaine versus crack cocaine. 

As SJWs are fond of whining, crack use is indeed punished harder than powder cocaine, and that does indeed disproportionately affect blacks more than it does whites. That much, I will admit, is not part of “the narrative”—it is indeed objectively true. 

However, the narrative is being applied here, and what it doesn’t tell you is that this double standard in policing was demanded, and received. 

What? 

Allow me to introduce you to Charles Rangel, a Democratic senator from New York State. While he is perhaps best known today for being in favor of marijuana legalization, I can only assume that he made an about face after realizing how much damage his earlier policies caused. 

For back in the 80s, Senator Rangel was probably the hardest of the hardline drug warriors that fought the Reagan administration’s culture war. He was a major backer of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that has more than anything else given the United States the embarrassingly high incarceration rate that it currently “enjoys” (and which flogging might alleviate as I argued here, and another writer has argued here). 

More specifically related to the thesis of this article, the 1986 act described above is specifically the law that created the disparate sentencing for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. 

Let me point out the high-larious irony of this: the laws that allegedly destroyed the black family and black America on the whole were sponsored… by a black man. Also worth pointing out is that the 1986 anti-drug law can arguably be considered part of a larger trend within mid 20th century African-American politics. 

When perusing documentation from the time you can see a major complaint is that the police allegedly ignored black neighborhoods and communities, which naturally engendered an environment where criminals plied their criminal trade without fear of punishment. Indeed, you will find instances where African-Americans demanded that the police pay more attention to their community! 

The train of thought from general police attention, to demanding harsher sentences for crack use, to demanding that the police use body cams… it all seems broadly similar, doesn’t it? Always demanding more stringency from society’s watchmen.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.