My Shameful Racism
For the past 3 months I have been attending monthly meetings with several hundred other Ithacans to discuss and learn about the issue of mass incarceration. This is an issue I had never heard about until I saw the documentary "The House I live in" and then 13. The theory is that the war on drugs started in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan has actually been a tool of social and racial control. By creating lengthy sentences for very minor drug offenses and then targeting African American offenders we now have an extremely unbalanced incarceration rate of blacks vs. whites. I have lived in the United States for 4 years. Every country in the world has racism and prejudice of various kinds. In America, white supremacy has been built into the very fabric of the nation. When America was founded, blacks were defined as 3/4 human. Abolition of slavery came. Jim Crow laws were passed - and then Jim Crow was outlawed. After Jim Crow came mass incarceration. As one acade