No

by Laurie Hawel

Created on: April 25, 2011

Has the civil rights war been won?

Not only has the civil right war not been won, American society is sliding further and further back to the point in time of absolute slavery.  If the premise of “civil rights” is that all people are equal and have equal access to opportunities, then, no, we cannot even begin to suggest with a straight face that the “war has been won.”

If you want to read a magnificent and scholarly book that details this claim, check out “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander. In this book, Alexander makes and documents her compelling argument that slavery has morphed into two significant forms since the end of the Civil War.

The first morphing was the creation of the Jim Crow era in which blacks were economically and politically subjugated by a formal and informal collection of laws and social structures that allowed the dominant society to recreate what it had lost to the Emancipation Proclamation: ownership of a class of human beings. During this phase of ownership blacks had no right to vote, could not live where they chose, could not attend the schools of their choice, could not marry outside of their race, could not receive fair and impartial trials by juries of their peers and could not reasonably expect that their children would have better lives than their own, to name only a handful of indignities and injustices this group suffered during the Jim Crow era.

When the civil rights movement of the 1960’s managed to partially dismantle the Jim Crow era, the nation could have reasonably hoped that we would eventually heal and move on to the creation of a society that embraced justice, equality and equal opportunity for all. At that moment in time many gains were made and once again, the dominant class had to retreat underground and recoup their strength and devise new strategies in order to continue to subjugate, and own, this large group of dark-colored, valuable, humans.

Enter the War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex, which is the thrust of Alexander’s book. The War on Drugs skillfully created an entire new class in society – drug criminals. There have always been criminals, obviously, but now there was a managed system in place which could create criminals, permanently take away their rights (specifically their civil rights), and at the same time create a huge multi-billion dollar industry around this brilliant new product, the black drug criminal.

In the War on Drugs the types of drug “crimes” that were made most seriously punishable were those committed almost exclusively in black communities. Even though studies prove conclusively that young white, upper-class males are the most likely to use drugs in our society, they are using drugs which are far less seriously criminalized. At the same time, the cheaper kinds of drugs (used on the whole less than drugs are used by whites), used by black communities were highly and seriously criminalized.

So now the deck is fully rigged: white youth, who are using most of the drugs, have extremely light sentences for any kind of use – even if they were to be caught, which is in itself unlikely because police do not have a fondness for arresting the children of educated white people who have resources and who vote. White people can hire good lawyers for their children and they can also make a political stink in their community. Black people, who suffer an extreme gulf of economic disparity in the United States do not have these weapons at their disposal.  There are no such constraints on police in the black community. Not only are the penalties much more severe than those for drug crimes committed by whites, the chance that a black parent will have the resources or political “pull” to get their children out of trouble are far less likely than in white communities.

This is a very convenient situation for the folks who have built the Prison Industrial Complex – huge warehouses designed to house black youth are only the beginning of this vast economic river. Think of the economic implications of the support services needed for this imprisoned population: prisoners need to be fed, clothed, housed, guarded, transported, kept healthy – the list of services and products consumed by a prison are staggering, and this is all very profitable to society in many ways. Foremost, it is profitable to those providing the services, but it is also profitable to society in another way – it keeps a large group of people out of the job market. And it not only keeps them out of the job market whilst they are imprisoned, but due to the prevalence of criminal background checks in hiring practices, most convicts, once released from prison, cannot find employment.

Even more sinister, in my opinion, is the fact that felons lose their right to vote. The implications of that sentence are huge. To not be able to vote is to not be able to change the laws that so unfairly create this huge, imprisoned, unemployable underclass.

This subject is far too complicated to treat in the space of a short article, and it is unpleasant thinking and reading for most people who would prefer to believe that the Civil Rights war has been won; however, it takes a heroic act of not knowing to believe that is true.

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