“Law and Order”

The “War on Drugs” really was never a war on drugs but was actually a war on marginalized communities in the United States. 13^th is a documentary that explores the systemic issues continually faced by black Americans from the era of slavery to today. It reveals the true impact of a lot of laws and approaches to crime that actually disproportionately affected black communities.

Specifically with the war on crime, the documentary discusses how when Nixon declared his “war on drugs”, it specifically was made as a way to target black communities by criminalizing drug use. They specifically targeted arrests for crack and heroin, as these were drugs found in poorer communities. This specifically attacked black communities as the legacy of redlining (discrimination in housing) from the early 20th century pushed black families into low-income and economically stagnant areas. The legacy remains as once families are put in lower-income areas it becomes hard to escape with limited access to good education (as education is normally paid for by property taxes and in lower-income areas, there will be fewer funds to provide this), good jobs, and a lack of ability to accrue generational wealth through property, keeping many black families stuck in poorer communities. Poorer areas are more susceptible to crime and drugs, meaning that the crackdown on drugs and crime had a disproportionate effect on the black community. There is also a history of over-surveillance by police in black neighborhoods.

This caused police to be able to arrest and prosecute drug users very easily and harshly, who tended to be black or Hispanic, basically criminalizing these lower-income communities of people that they (the government) created themselves. This was specifically mentioned by a former member of Nixon’s staff that this was their intention: to criminalize these drugs to criminalize being black. This wasn’t an accident by lawmakers, as shown by Nixon’s staff, it was a deliberate choice to attack a certain group of people. It plays into and perpetuates the pervasive stereotype throughout the history of this country that black people are criminals. Lawmakers knew that it played into this stereotype and that by doing this they would gain support from white voters who wanted “law and order”, therefore benefiting themselves.

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