By Thomas Ford
Originally Posted on October 6, 2012
A major problem with our electorate is many Brown & Blaq citizens refuse to read between the lines when they hear people describe President Obama or his policies. We have either forgotten or we ignore our consciousness, our gut feeling when we hear racial ‘code’ phrases synonymous with white supremacist ideology, i.e.,: food stamp president, he’s a Muslim, wasn’t born here, communist, socialist, he’s building the welfare state, he has a rhythm we don't understand, doesn’t have the stamina and desire to be president (lazy), false president, should go play basketball etc...
We heard these coded attacks on urban citizens before coming from several prominent presidential administrations Nixon, who called drug abuse "public enemy number one", which led to aggressive criminal justice policies. Nancy Regan’s “Just say no” campaign led to aggressive federal antidrug legislation. Remember Congress and the Reagan administration's response to crack cocaine vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparities, which resulted in the Antidrug Act of 1986, which established a 100:1 ratio for mandatory minimum sentencing associated with cocaine? It would take 5,000 grams of powdered cocaine to land you in prison for a minimum 10 years--but only 50 grams of crack.
“The war on drugs/get tough on crime” rhetoric which was code for, let’s instigate a war against poor Blaq/Brown citizens and make a whole bunch of loot in the process via the over-proliferation of the for-profit ‘PRISON PLANTATION INDUSTRY’ and mass incarceration.
EXIT-US, in Philadelphia, is the first and only social transformation organization to use the description, prison plantation industry to describe the over-criminalization of urban citizens; however, this excerpt from H. Bruce Franklin, “From Plantation to Penitentiary to the Prison-Industrial Complex: Literature of the American Prison”, 2000; (read below) provides a great historical analysis for why EXIT-US has coined this phrase.
...The prison looms today as a central feature of American society. Since 1976, we have been building on average one prison every week. More than two million Americans are now crammed into the nation's still overcrowded jails and prisons. In fact, there are now about as many prisoners in America as there are farmers. Over half of those incarcerated are people of color. More than four million Americans, again mainly people of color, have been permanently disenfranchised because of felony convictions, many under laws enacted explicitly to prevent African-Americans from voting. Studies have shown that this disenfranchisement has had a significant impact on the outcome of presidential and senate elections prior to 2000. We need no detailed studies to show the direct impact of this disenfranchisement on the most recent national election. Prior to November 2000, one third of the African-American men in Florida were convicted as felons and then stripped of their right to vote, while thousands more were purged from the voting rolls as alleged felons by fiat of a corporation hired by Governor Jeb Bush. If only a small percentage of Florida's 204,000 disenfranchised male African-American citizens (not to mention the other 200,000 disenfranchised ex-felons in Florida) had been allowed to vote in 2000, even the U.S. Supreme Court could not have installed George W. Bush as President of the United States..H. Bruce Franklin.
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