It's time some of the members of the white community stopped lying to themselves.
The hypocrisy is stunning; departing from racialized images of crack users, data from National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) shows that people reporting cocaine use in 1991 were 75% white; 15% black, and 10% Hispanic. People who admitted to using crack were 52% white, 38% black, and 10% Hispanic. Comparing that to
US Sentencing Commission data showing 79% of 5,669 sentenced crack offenders were black, 10% were Hispanic, and only 10% were white, only lends credence to the contention that mandatory sentencing laws were racially biased and fundamentally flawed.
(Whites were 59 percent of the admitted crack users, 75 percent of the cocaine users, but 10 percent of those incarcerated for use of crack, and systemic racism does not exist)
However, despite all the evidence to the contrary, America insisted on continuing its inane, pointless “War On Drugs,” which has resulted in little but the highest incarceration rate per capita of any industrialized nation, and countless stories of broken homes and destroyed communities which only continue the cycle of hopelessness, poverty, and desperation that cause people to turn to selling or using drugs in the first place. Still, the human cost has not been counted, because for every story recollected to public consciousness, hundreds more go untold. While the epidemic itself is over, new ones have sprung up to take its place; in particular,
America now faces the same moral quandary over addictive opioids.
However, the face of this crisis looks vastly different; this time it’s the white, rural members of society in the spotlight, and the coverage has accordingly evolved as well. Instead of a hysterical panic and insistence on law-and-order crackdowns, politicians are pleading for understanding and treatment.
America is fascinated by tales of the exploits of gangsters, hustlers, dealers, and killers, but the human cost has yet to be counted.
uproxx.com
Now that whites are the ones dying of opiod addiction, we don't need law and order. We must have understanding and treatment programs. But systemic racism does not exist. When members of the white racist subculture want to start ranting about blacks and crime, maybe they should consider not doing so.