An Inconvenient Truth

Fantastic opinion piece in the N&O today, don’t miss it. UNC doctoral candidate Raj Ghoshal delineates the discrimination against African-Americans that still infects our society, despite our recent presidential pick. While it is wonderful to celebrate Obama’s victory and our nation’s (and state’s!) choosing him, we need not rest on our laurels.

There are numerous examples of our systemic racism and the toll it takes on black Americans, but our (in)justice system deserves special attention.

* Beginning in the 1980s, the number of Americans in jail began to skyrocket. This increase was largely driven by more African-Americans being incarcerated as part of the escalating war on drugs. Despite a wide array of evidence that whites and blacks use drugs at similar rates, African-American men are now arrested for drug crimes at three times the rate of white men and incarcerated for drug crimes at 10 times the white male rate.

* Even in matters of life and death, the law is not color-blind. A 2006 study by Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and her colleagues showed that how stereotypically ‘black’ a convicted killer looks has a significant effect on whether that person is sentenced to death, with dark-skinned African-Americans receiving death sentences most often.”

I think the war on drugs is a war on young, black men (I’ve said so here before), and one of my frustrations in recent years has been the dearth of candidates who agree with me. It’s hard to vote when two issues one finds absolutely critical – the travesty that is the drug war and the horror of a modern nation still allowing the death penalty – are never on the pols’ radars. I suppose most libertarians agree that both are bad, but I can’t get psyched to vote for them since I love the post office and, oh, the fire department and, um, street lights. Cheers to Ghoshal for writing the truth for all to read. The truth will set us free, but not without a lot of change to back it up.