Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Michelle Alexander - The new jim crow
Slavery is outlawed*(amendment 13), but racism isn’t.
Imprisonment is racist when systematically designed to incarcerate young black men (from 300k to 2m) in the 30 years since raegan’s backwards war on drugs, a program intentionally stoked by his support of guerilla armies in Nicaragua’s civil war. In ‘98, the CIA admitted encouraging the smuggling of crack by these guerillas into US inner-cities because it helped fund said civil war.
His cabinet capitalized on crack increases to market the WoD to the public, coinciding with a downturn causing black-dominated factory work to shift overseas to non-union, wage-gouged work. Color casting is cyclic.
Mass incarceration’s true nature is no different than religion’s: a blunt tool for social control. Prisons are the best business in town. Ask Tom Beasley, may he die horribly. Check out Angola Prison’s Rodeo and watch cotton-picking inmates fight bulls for cash to a crowd of freemen.
Rebublican-sponsored Jim Crow laws prevented black americans from voting through poll taxes, literacy tests, and vagrancy laws, catalyzing racial casting. Racial caste systems don’t need racial hostility to thrive, only indifference.
The New Jim Crow is more subtle. The Bryne program funneled federal funds to state and local police to build narcotics task forces otherwise focused on violent crime in a time when drugs weren’t the national problem we’re taught it was.
Prosecutors nudge defendants of minor drug charges into plea bargains for lesser sentences with the caveat of maintaining felony status and a lifelong exclusion from voting, employment, housing, and benefits eligibility. The blowback fuels bias and a continued self-fulfilling impoverishment prophecy.
The world is as backward as ever. On this year’s MLK day, the FBI tweeted support for what he did for black rights, the same FBI that leaked his address and phoned him death threats before a radicalized idiot took their words seriously and put a bullet in him.
Americans now blend identity and ideology, letting extremist conservatism prune their minds to sludge, shunning change and imagining the great 1950s they never saw, times only resultant of a world war rebound.