| >As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history. Well, it's not. In living memory: >The wealth of black Americans was halved by the 2008 financial crisis, in part because of predatory lending practices which specifically targeted them by race and misrepresented their creditworthiness https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/t... >A million black farming families essentially had their wealth-producing land stolen from them:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-la... https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/losing-ground/ >Multiple black activists pushing for more advantageous policy have been imprisoned and assassinated, with allegedly some incidents as recent as the last few years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luth.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie... >Black students have become subject to levels of segregation - and associated disparities in educational quality - at levels rivalling those of pre-Brown v Board America https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-full-text https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation >Because many black workers were exempt from the initial impementation of Social Security and the GI Bill, their children (Silent Gen and Baby Boomers, currently in the process of passing on their inheritances) and grandchildren (Gen X and Millennials) are suffering the consequences in lost wealth-building opportunities >Countless black Americans have suffered from poor healthcare based on apathy and stereotypes https://features.propublica.org/diabetes-amputations/black-a... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-american... https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/02/20/why-are-black-women... >Black Americans have watched a completely different and profoundly more compassionate response to the white people affected by the opioid epidemic than they experienced in the crack/cocaine epidemic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-h... https://thewitnessbcc.com/crack-epidemic-opioid-crisis-race-... >Marijuana, long a a drug whose sale and use was the pretext for the overpolicing of black communities, and which provided off-the-record income for many marginalized from the mainstream economy, was legalized in several states, under schemes that made sure that the overwhelming majority of those who profited were white. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/22/marijuana-... https://qz.com/1194143/even-after-legalization-black-america... https://psmag.com/economics/the-green-rush-is-too-white-hood... >Historical atrocities were buried until after those afflicted were unable to see justice in their lifetimes https://tulsa.okstate.edu/news/shedding-light-local-history-... And, of course, bare-naked discrimination exists across aspects of American life, including employment, compensation, educational opportunity, freedom of movement, criminal justice, real estate, and on and on and on. When these and many more injustices were not directly impactful, they served as poignant examples of the extreme apathy, if not antipathy, American society has had for black Americans. On top of it all, black Americans still live under the specter of police departments nationwide, which have been allegedly infiltrated by white supremacist organizations, and which assuredly indoctrinate officers with racist training and policy, and root out anti-racist individuals. I'll leave you with https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/... a response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' seminal work, The Case For Reparations (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...), which reopened the intellectual debate on racial justice with a focus on the subject above: racial injustice affecting living black Americans, however rooted it may be in the events of 50-60-70-150 years ago. |
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-h....
https://thewitnessbcc.com/crack-epidemic-opioid-crisis-race-....
Great post and you brought up a few things I hadn't considered. Just curious about this one though. America in general has gradually shifted towards a view that drug addicts are sick people that need help. The shift was already taking place before opioids and methamphetamine addiction reached epidemic levels. How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?
I'm not super educated on the opioid epidemic, but is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?