African Americans Face A War On More Than One Front By Wes Moore

This essay, largely drawn from Elijah Anderson's forthcoming book, Code of the Street, offers an ethnographic representation of the workings of the code of the street in the context of the trying socioeconomic situation in which the inner-city black community finds itself, as jobs have become ever more scarce, public assistance has increasingly disappeared, and frustration has been building for many. The material presented here was gathered through many visits to various inner-city families and neighborhood settings, including carry-outs, laundromats, taverns, playgrounds, and street corners. In these settings, Anderson conducted indepth interviews with adolescent boys and girls, young men (some incarcerated, some not), older men, teenage mothers,

Phillippe Burgois, the author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, lived in East Harlem doing research for 3 years. His wife and child also lived with him during this time. Burgois was interested in studying the social and economic aspects of East Harlem, also known as El Barrio. His research required him to be closely involved with the crack dealers in the area. In my review, I will first, summarize the main points of the book.

This book talks about how African American and Latino young men in Oakland, California are most likely to targeted by police. The author Victor M. Rios, who once was a gang member and juvenile delinquent, but turned his life around. Explains how youth of color in his hometown are harassed, profiled, watched, and disciplined at young ages by authorities. Even though they have not committed any crimes. It took him three-year study to calculate is data and present it. For this observation, Rios used 40 African American and Latino young men in Oakland.

This African-American culture within Detroit shapes and gives meaning to the lives of Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps. The overarching cultural element of African-American culture within Detroit affecting the two main interlocutors is the street drug trade. The culture of the street drug trade can be thought of as having three overarching effects on the adolescents which shape and give meaning to their lives, economic effects, kinship effects, and political effects.

According to the article, The Drug War, Mass Incarceration, and Race “ Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population,10 and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races.11 But black people comprise 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations,12 and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated”. Despite the fact that colored people are minorities in the country still, make up 1/3 of the people arrested because of the drug policy. The policy effective created to target the minorities by making the cocaine the main focus of the drug. “America of the poor, where, amid hopelessness and lack of education, people will suffer the worst consequences of cocaine”(Kerr, 1) which in many poor communities lived the colored minorities, this made it easier for the police officer to target and arrest the

Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow In “The New Jim Crow”, author Michelle Alexander argues that the war on drugs is just an excuse to target African Americans and keep millions of black people in poverty or in jail. Alexander thinks that racism is still very prevalent in today’s world. She believes that the criminal justice system uses the system of mass incarceration to control black people and exclude them from the political process. Many African American people are not allowed to vote because they have gone to jail and they are labeled felons for life.

He gives heavy claims and statistics throughout his article, using the rhetorical appeal logos. Hart claims that in the late 1980’s the “majority of crack users were white” and “most drug users buy their drugs from dealers within their own racial group.” While Hart certainly expresses these statements confidently, he does not support them with statistics or sources. It is difficult to believe that the majority of drug users in the crack epidemic of the late 1980’s were white when this issue was felt by numerous black individuals in the inner cities. Hart hopes to persuade his audience to believe him with these passionate, strong statements but fails to provide support for these claims.

The word hustle is and will always be embedded in the black community. As young black males the word little-man intertwine with hustle, Whitehead (1994) shows how young drug dealers fights to establish their right-of-passage to do whatever to become the “Big Man”. The problem with trying to be the “Big Man” this was leading to the increasing of homicide among young black men between the ages of 15-34 (whitehead, 1994). This was a historical pattern of limited education and a limited job rewarding system to the African American male in the 1980’s. African American males was seeking to live the life as the counter-part the white male that was awarded education and the jobs.

The government publicized the emergence of crack cocaine as defense strategy to create a favorable public opinion for the drug war: “The media was saturated with images of black crack whores, crack dealers, and crack babies—images that seemed to conform the worst negative racial stereotypes about impoverished inner-city residents” (Alexander, 5). During the war, arrests and convictions for drug offenses saw an amazing increase, especially among African Americans. Because of the drug war, the United States now holds the highest incarceration rate in the world even surpassing more the world’s most suppressive nations. No other country imprisons more of their racial or ethnic minorities than the United States does: “The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid” (Alexander, 6). The War on Drugs fueled mass imprisonment in the United States in which African American were the main victims.

By the preliminary year of 1990s, the crack period that engulfed New York City in the 1980s was on the path to failure and delinquency percentages were correspondingly decreasing. But Randol Contreras noticed something special on the roads in South Bronx community where he grew up. Randol observed how his drug-distributing friends were no longer making money from retailing crack, but were revolving to mugging other dealers for a progressively deteriorating segment of the drug domain. Randol Contreras wrote the book, The Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence, and the American Dream. Randol shadowed a unit of Dominican males from streets of New York who were born at the end of the Crack Era.

As African Americans we have a target on our backs one rooted in hate. However, it is our job to continue fighting for our right and our place in the world to be known. Many white officers do not receive any type of sentencing in court especially in cases that include the lost lives of one of our own. They live in fear of the threat that we pose especially when during slavery times we talked in letters or through songs rather than disobeying master. Additionally, this behavior is what we have tried to overcome, but we are constantly being judged because of the color of our skin.

The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration The United States incarcerates at a higher rate than any other country in the world. In fact, the U.S. alone is home to 25% of the world’s prison population; this, however, wasn’t always the case. The rapid growth of the U.S. prison population can be traced two decades back to the declaration of the War on Drugs by President Ronald Regan in the early eighties and previously mentioned by President Richard Nixon. In an effort to reassure White Americans’ of their elite positioning in the underlying racial caste system in a time where inner-city communities were facing major economic collapses, the Regan administration called for the reinforcement of the sale, distribution, and consumption of illicit drugs,

During the time of the Great Depression, African Americans struggled the most already being the poorest people in America, but this changed with The Second World War which brought jobs and more rights to African Americans. In Chapters 10 and 11 of the book Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its meanings, 1619 to the present by Nell Irvin Painter, the author outlines the struggle for African Americans during the Great Depression, and even after during the New Deal era, then shows how they came out of it and became more successful and powerful during The Second World War. The Great Depression started with the crash of the stock market, and led to 25% of all American workers losing their jobs, most of which were African Americans.

“The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen-people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated” (Stevenson 15). For our society to function, we need to fix areas that are broken. One is the perception and treatment of African Americans.

The rise in violent conflicts between the citizens of the United States and the police is the issue that I want to solve. Due to my own age, race and gender, I am very well aware that I may be personally and directly impacted by this issue. The interaction between people of color and law enforcement in America is a key aspect of this larger issue. This issue has two main viewpoints: (1) that of people of color and, (2) that of law enforcement. While these two viewpoints overlap and intersect at several points, I believe them to be separate problems, each caused by different things.