In my most recent conversation with John McWhorter, we formulate a series of responses to âSimone,â our fictionalized version of a young black student who believes that systemic racism explains all or most of the racial disparities in the US. We chose a few specific topics where these sorts explanations are commonly deployed, and we attempted to explain why there are aspects of the problem that systemic racism canât account for.
But that doesnât mean we simply abandon the idea that racial biasâwhether conscious or unconsciousâcan have a major impact on black lives. The notorious disparities between penalties for possessing crack cocaine and penalties for possessing powder cocaine in the â80s and â90s is a place where it very well might have. Offenses involving crack cocaine were punished much more harshly than those involving powder cocaineâ500 grams of powder cocaine (i.e., a lot of cocaine) would trigger a five-year federal mandatory minimum sentence, whereas it took only 5 grams of crack to trigger the same sentence. Since crack was most often sold in black communities, the vast majority of people locked up on these charges were black.
As John and I discuss below, there were plenty of reasons these laws came into existence, not the least of which were complaints from black leaders representing communities devastated by the crack epidemic and the violence that came with it. You canât attribute that to racism. But neither can you ignore the willingness of American society at large to accept a set of laws that incarcerated a staggering number of black men.
This is a complicated issue and in some ways a personal one. Let me know what you think in the comments.
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JOHN MCWHORTER: And here's another one: powdered cocaine and crack. Part of the motivation, correct me if I'm wrong, Glenn, because you were there in a sense that I wasn't, but powdered cocaine was sentenced ... I just mean that you âŚ
GLENN LOURY: Yeah, I know what you meant. Iâm older than you are.
You were grown-er. You were studying it. But like, powder cocaine and crack. They came down harder on crack, partly because crack was sold in out outdoor markets and the selling of crack created the kind of violence that can help tear up a neighborhood. Because powder cocaine was mainly dealt on playgrounds and in basements and partaken of there. And so there was a sense that crack is more dangerous to the urbanity than Ethan doing some lines in the bathroom in his parents' house. So there was that.
And then there was also that black leaders were behind those laws when they were initially instituted. Now today, that's called just naked structural racism. It was racist that crack was cracked down on more than powdered cocaine. I have watched white guys do high fives talking about that. But was it really that simple? There was the idea that crack was more dangerous, and a lot of black people thought so, which means that the idea that it was systemic racism is much weaker than we're often told. Am I onto something there? Or am I missing missing that?
Oh well, it's a long time ago it feels like now. But yeah, the crack-powder disparity 100 to one. The minimum weight needed to trigger the mandatory minimum sentence of the crack cocaine was one one-hundreth of the minimum weight for the powder cocaine. And the mandatory minimum sentences did get applied in federal cases, and that that was a disparity. It's true that the many African American representatives in Congress supported the legislation on that because their communities were catching hell. Who's the guy? The Silent Black Majority? The writer, political scientist?
Michael Fortner?
Yeah. Michael Fortner explores this in the case of heroin in New York City and the Rockefeller Drug Laws in the â70s and â80s. And James Forman at Yale, the law professor there, explores the same theme in the case of Washington, D.C. Crack cocaine and the depredations of the drug disorder. And sure, there was push in the black community for law enforcement because people were being affected adversely by the violence that accompanied the trade. But is that structural racism? I mean, of course that invites the whole incarceration, mass incarceration thing. And you know, I've written about this in a register very sympathetic to structural racism arguments, saying in part because the people who were caught up in this with disproportionately black, the larger society didn't pull back from the brink.
Even if the intent were not explicitly anti-black, the experiment, the social experiment of expanding the number in prison from 500,000 to 2 million in a quarter century, which is a remarkable institutional upheaval ⌠We completely changed the way in which we deal with social disorder and social dysfunction, ratcheting, very substantially, up the degree of punitiveness, which could be measured along a lot of different dimensions, including the various scale of people who are incarcerated. Of course, a rise in crime had something to do with that, and the more subtle historical analyses credit the fact that crime rates induced in the popular sentiment a much greater tolerance for punitive legislation.
But, you know, we overshot. I mean, I think it's a fair reading of history that we overshot. I think a lot of conservatives and people agree that we overshot, and in the '00s, we pulled back, and those numbers peaked out and they leveled. Now crime did come down as well. But I think the sentiment against incarceration at the scale that it had reached by the late 1990s is pretty widespread in this society. So we pulled back.
But here's the structural racism argument that I think has to be taken seriously, which is if the racial issue hadn't been so central in crime and punishment and in the representation of blacks within those who were really, really on the brunt end of the punitive regime, would we have had a differentâwe collectively, the polity and the culture of the United States of America, the political cultureâhave had a different reaction, been less tolerant of the excess as if they had been falling upon people about whom we had a greater degree of concern? I don't think that's an implausible thing to say.
No.
That racial stigma. You take the history back. Roll it back not just to the â00s or to the â90s or to the â80s. Roll it back to the â50s and to the â40s. Roll it back into the â20s and to the â10s. And the insinuation of racial stereotyping, of racial derogation, of racial contempt. You know, it's hard to escape that in the lynching and the enforcement of Jim Crow in the South, it's hard to escape it in the teeming cities of the Northeast and the Midwest in the mid-twentieth century.
[In] the â60s, you see what happens with the riots and stuff. You get explosion after explosion, a lot of it around law enforcement issues, the Kerner Commission, et cetera. Yes, they were liberals. Yes, they might've been a little bit starry-eyed. Yeah, but they weren't crazy, and they weren't all wrong about what they were describing in terms of the ghetto of America. It was only a quarter century after Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, which is a devastating indictment and chronicle of racial subordination in the 1930s and the 1940s. So, you know, it's not like there's no there there. I mean, you'd have to be blind to history to think that there was no there there.
No one knew what the outcome was going to be. And once the outcome happened, sensitivity to it was weaker because people deep down didn't care as much about black people.
Plausible hypothesis.
Plausible hypothersis. But I want to get at this. This is what Simone is thinking. This is what's taught to people in college. In the early-â90s, were there white people who, although not explicitly, decided âLet's target crack cocaine more because when black people create disorder, it's a worse thing than when white people do.â Is that what was going on or was there another reason, such as open-air violence, that crack cocaine was given the harder penalty? Because Simone thinks that it was because of racism.
I'm sorry to have to report that I know way too much about crack cocaine, man. I mean, because I used to be a crack cocaine addict in the 1980s, so I could have gotten myself shot dead out there on the streets of Boston, Massachusetts. And I'd go back to Chicago sometimes and hang out with some of my old schoolmates and stuff like that. You know, Chicago in the 1980s is not Chicago in the 2020s, because probably in the 2020s, you be going around the drug houses, you end up with a bullet in your head. But it was a lot of cash money. Very easily storable small transactions, frequent. You know, drug houses, people sliding the drugs under the door and whatnot. A lot of people walking around with guns. And there was just a lot of violence. The bodies piled up. And you look at the murder rates in these cities in the late-â80s and early-â90s, it makes today look like a walk in the park. I mean, we're still lower than the peak of the violent crime rates that were reached in the 1990s.
And this is why crack cocaine was penalized more, wasn't it?
Yeah! Because of the violence, because of the stories that were in the newspaper. Because how many drug deals gone bad and multiple homicides with kids in the back room can you have in the newspaper before somebody says, âEnoughâ?
In other words, it wasn't white people thinking, âWhen black people make noise, it gets on our nerves. And so we're going to penalize more.â Because that's what Simone is taught.
Well, there probably was some of that. I mean the crack baby hysteria, right? The whole cohort of black babies was going to be deficient because there were so many mothers on crack. There was kind of hysteria about that. I'm sure you can find hyperbole and exaggeration in popular culture and certain stereotyping images that get projected and whatnot. But a lot of the response was coming from black people in those communities themselves.
The thing is, for the Elect, any disparity between races is racism. In 2016, London Airport was shut down by a BLM protest because global warming is racist. The context being that European countries contribute more to global warming than African countries, but that African countries suffer more from the effects. By the standard definition of racism, that is... not. But if you stretch the definition of racism to be something that creates any kind of disparate impact between people of different races AND something only attributable to white people (power + prejudice, reserving the less impactful term "prejudiced" for PoC), well then it's easy to take advantage of the power of the word "racist" without having to prove any kind of malice. As an aside, this is why I think this topic *absolutely* falls into Professor McWhorter's wheelhouse. The subversion of language and loading of words has been a key method of the social movement. It's a linguistic blitzkreig, at least at the common level. I can't comment on the academic level, I work in a strip club, we're about as far from ivory tower as it gets. But you introduce a phrase or a redefinition of a word, with the implication that it's an important academic clarification and if you don't get that, well, we won't call you "stupid" exactly, but surely you can see how necessary this is for the fight for equality. You do want equality, right? And then, before there's time for people to say "wait, this doesn't actually make sense..." you use that as the basis for the next phrase. Who, besides Professor McWhorter, is going back to examine the worth of the idea of being born with a paucity of melanin as culpability for all the ills of society? It's been accepted, we've moved on, and if you're questioning something that all of society has accepted, well, there must be something rather backwards about you.
So it matters not a whit whether what the motivation was or who was behind the disparity in sentencing. Motivation is not part of racism to the Elect, except that the term racist still implies intent to the rest of the country (and if you really press them on the issue, they'll just tell you that it's subconscious, a manifestation of every white person's inherent racism). And if it was supported by, or even largely driven by black people? Well they were the victims of a white power structure that caused them to internalize self-hatred. Blameless dupes of diabolical machinations by white America into sabotaging their own emergence on the national stage! Which brings me to the part of the subject that is Professor Loury's forte, the economic aspect. I am not an economist, so perhaps my views are hopelessly naive and simplistic, but I have thought for a while that the primary (not only, but certainly primary) issue is not systemic/structural racism in America, but the fact that economic mobility in general is awful in the US. If you're born poor, for a multitude of reasons, you're almost certain to die poor, or, at best, middle class. Couple that with the fact that 50 or 60 years ago there were massive roadblocks to black business ownership, and you're looking at perhaps 2 generations where economic growth was plausible. Black people aren't victims of some massive conspiracy (at least, not at this point) to keep them down and they're not incapable of being successful businesspeople, but the slow moving nature of generational wealth has kept black people from achieving success as a demographic. It becomes an issue of scope - as a whole black people in the US are worse off than white people, as a whole, but at any given level of economic success, the differences are far more minor. Certainly less salient than the problems accompanying poverty itself.
I think that belief is what makes me love Professor McWhorter's 3 points. When drugs stop being the best method to generate wealth for the poor, you eliminate much of the reason
(still have theft and prostitution, but it will shift a lot of people out of crime) for antagonistic interactions between police and the poor - of any skin tone. I think that relationship is a feedback loop. Poor black people are taught to expect police to be out to get them. "The Talk" sets up an expectation that is often self-fulfilling. In all honesty, you see much of the same antagonistic attitudes out of young urban white and hispanic people as well, with generally similar results in LEO interactions, but that doesn't represent as large a portion of those populations and certainly isn't pushed in the media. I have two major contentions with the "free college for all" idea. One is that it's unecessary - a PhD doesn't make a trucker more efficient at his job. Two is that the actual consequence would be exactly the opposite of what the proponents claim to want. It has no effect on the wealthy - they can go to any school they want at any time. For the middle class, it's a boon. But for the poor? For people working 3 part time jobs to keep a roof over their head and food in their bellies? Zero tuition, even no-cost books, doesn't remove the need for rent and sustenance. So what happens when the proportion of the workforce that has a degree goes up? Well, the requirement for degrees goes up! If you have 10 candidates and 8 have degrees, who is hiring one of the 2 without? Which means those people who are already behind the 8 ball in terms of potential for success just get buried deeper in the corner, and that means, like it or not, disproportionately black people. So the real effect of such legislation is just a widening of the wealth gap and a greater disparity between white and black demographics. Finally, effective communication is a basic that has to be met before effective teaching can happen. Slightly off-point but I think we need to invest more in teachers and K-12 education and (unpopular opinion) move money away from special needs and alt-school students and reallocate it to gifted programs. Rising tide lifts all ships and it takes more resources to turn these disadvantaged students into productive citizens than it does to turn bright students into the next Curie or Salk who can make improvements that benefit all of society, including those who are less capable.
Wasnât the sentence disparity a federal issue? Werenât the overwhelming majority of drug distribution cases handled by state jurisdictions (without the same disparity)? Wasnât Meth predominantly associated with white communities (at least in 90s) and didn't they have sentences on par with crack? I can tell you anecdotally that as a cop in the 90s, we didnât care whether it was powder or crackâŚwe were happy to arrest the dealer. Later, as a prosecutor, I was happy to make the same sentencing case regardless of race but prior convictions played a role as did the violence or guns associated with the offense. Finally, we werenât excited about arresting or charging strictly users. We would push them to treatment. Crack dealers were dealing poison. Anyone who saw what a crack addiction did to a person, could not argue honestly that it as a victimless crime. Meth as well. Point being, it was worse than most audience members could know and it needed urgent attention. I do remember arguing however that, rather than long sentences, we needed certain and swift accountability with a mandatory term of years. Long enough to break their routine and criminal relationships but not so long they acclimated to prison and it lost its deterrent effect. I theorized 2 years based on conversations with inmates.