Part 3
So federal policy helped a create a difficult situation for black Americans, as they were locked out of The American Dream. As crime rose in minority communities, our American leaders put on their thinking caps and decided the best way to help black people was by locking them in cages. Protests were becoming popular, and the government had to figure out a way to stop them. To quote top Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman:
“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.”
The efforts to incarcerate black people were highly effective. For example, in Texas, the state incarceration quadrupled rate quadrupled between 1978 and 2003. At it's peak more people were incarcerated than the Soviets did during the Gulag. And of course, black people were the biggest victims - around 40 percent of the total prison population at any given time is black people, compared to black people being about 12 percent of the population. These actions, combined with the disenfranchisement of felons and the other traditional ways we discriminate against felons, have helped reduce black people's political and economic power.
