Negative Space: racism
- America’s Drug Users
- Opium was prohibited because it was used by Orientals and cocaine because it was perceived as a Negro drug. More specifically, racist views of the time saw these peoples as less able to resist the criminalizing effects of drug use. Jazz was similarly stereotyped.
- Birth of a Nation
- One of the first feature-length films ever, notable for its historical value. Highly racist, even for its time.
- Black Man as a Cash Crop
- According to Xona, America’s most profitable crop is the Black-American, reaped by the Criminal Justice System.
- The Brother From Another Planet
- An extremely lesser-known movie, but very well directed (John Sayles) and acted (Joe Morton). It’s a movie about different worlds in a very literal as well as metaphorical sense!
- Capitalism, Religion, and Reform: The Social History of Temperance in Harvey, Illinois
- Ray Hutchison writes about the “conflicts between divergent subcultures in American society” that would eventually result in prohibition. Temperance communities may have been about keeping alcohol out, or they may have been about keeping Eastern Europeans out.
- Climate scientists say Hispanics, Africans mentally ill
- Study links living in warmer climates to increased rates of mental illness.
- The Exceptions: Indians and Blacks
- Whites were not allowed to sell liquor to blacks; and Europeans quickly took on an a paternal attitude at best towards the Natives.
- Forfeiture, Racism, and Gun Control
- Racist laws in the post-war south also included forfeiture for pretty much the same reason forfeiture exists today.
- From Reform to Reaction: The Sober Republic at Bay
- What’s fascinating to me is how much we’ve changed since repealing alcohol prohibition: there was once a time when appeal to racism did not suffice to keep bad laws. The calls for killing drug users when the drug was alcohol match almost exactly modern rhetoric. From adding poisons to the drug, to increasing penalties far beyond the bounds of the crime, we’ve seen all this before.
- Immigration and Antebellum Drinking
- German immigrants adapted their favorite lagers to the needs of native-born Americans, resulting in the “light-bodied, golden brew popular today”.
- A Nation of Drug Takers
- When America discovered that there were foreigners in the country, they conveniently forgot how recently they themselves had come over; the drugs those foreigners used became illegal. At first the laws targeted specific races; in time, the laws targeted everyone.
- The Paradox of Temperance: Blacks and the Alcohol Question in Nineteenth-Century America
- Denise Herd writes about the “paradox” that the progressive temperance movement was also highly racist. The “negro problem” was was a “central issue” that prohibition was meant to solve.
- A Political Opiate
- Lewis H. Lapham writes a little about the prejudices that fuel the drug war.
- Redeeming the Lost: Revivalists and Republicans
- Prohibition forces were also often anti-immigration forces. Germans and Irish might have been open to calls for moderation, but not to calls for full prohibition.
- Reefer Racism
- During the great depression, America needed a new scapegoat, and in the southwest that turned out to be the Mexican. One means of oppression was to stereotype them as marijuana users and then claim that marijuana turned them into brutes that only superior firepower could stop, much as law enforcement in the south claimed about Negros and cocaine.
- Society and Race Under Threat
- Mankind always seems to need scapegoats to explain their own failures. In the late nineteenth century alcohol became the primary scapegoat, explaining why men committed crimes. In various ways, alcohol has been blamed for the downfall of kingdoms such as the Roman Empire.
More Information
- The Brother From Another Planet (DVD)
-
A very unique film about a runaway slave… running away from interstellar slave-catchers. (John Sayles)
- I… See… Crazy People
-
“The only way to exempt yourself from these bizarre accusations is to support infinite deficit spending. Otherwise, you’re like a giant inkblot in a Rorshach test, onto which Michael Lind and Amanda Marcotte will project their paranoid fears… that you’re really a sex-panicked neo-Confederate upset about desegregation and “reproductive rights.”
- Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism-2010
-
“Once again, the American main stream media has asserted itself as the number one enemy of the truth, when the facts don’t fit the left-wing narrative. Like the NAACP, it has become no better than Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in its willingness to exploit race for political ends and their unflinching support of the Obama’s left-wing agenda.”
- Risk and Culture
-
Our perception of risk is colored by our cultural prejudices. A classic example are our “drug control policies” that put people in jail for using recreational drugs associated with foreigners, but the examples given here are just as bizarre: “No doubt the water in fourteenth century Europe was a persistent health hazard, but it became a public preoccupation only when it seemed plausible to accuse Jews of poisoning the wells.”
