In an interview with PBS’s Frontline in 1997, the activist Angela Davis discusses at length the issues affecting African-Americans in the United States and the efficacy of black protest as a means of challenging oppressive circumstances. Central to her thesis is the notion that “the black community” is far from as homogenous as the term implies, and that it is therefore inappropriate to universalise the African-American experience. To illustrate this, Davis references the growing divide between the black middle class and those “more impoverished than ever before”, and argues that the former demographic “identify with the brother on the street without taking up the kinds of political issues that are required to move black people who are in poverty
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For example, despite a slight decline in recent years, the total number of citizens incarcerated in the U.S. has grown by over four hundred thousand since 1997, with people of colour accounting for a disproportionate sixty-five percent of the country’s prison population. If this trend continues, research by the Sentencing Project advocacy group suggests that one in three black males born at the turn of the twenty-first century can expect to go to prison at some point in their lives, compared to one in seventeen white males. The “alternative economy” of the drug trade identified by Davis is believed to be accountable for almost half a million of all current sentences, with crack cocaine continuing to merit harsher penalties than its powdered counterpart despite President Obama’s attempts to address the disparity through the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Though the recent trend of marijuana legalisation in eight states may play a positive role in rectifying the “prison industrial complex”, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recently promised to utilise his powers as head of the Department of Justice to enforce “responsible policies” targeting recreational cannabis use, thereby reducing the likelihood of significant national drug reform in the near
For example, despite a slight decline in recent years, the total number of citizens incarcerated in the U.S. has grown by over four hundred thousand since 1997, with people of colour accounting for a disproportionate sixty-five percent of the country’s prison population. If this trend continues, research by the Sentencing Project advocacy group suggests that one in three black males born at the turn of the twenty-first century can expect to go to prison at some point in their lives, compared to one in seventeen white males. The “alternative economy” of the drug trade identified by Davis is believed to be accountable for almost half a million of all current sentences, with crack cocaine continuing to merit harsher penalties than its powdered counterpart despite President Obama’s attempts to address the disparity through the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. Though the recent trend of marijuana legalisation in eight states may play a positive role in rectifying the “prison industrial complex”, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recently promised to utilise his powers as head of the Department of Justice to enforce “responsible policies” targeting recreational cannabis use, thereby reducing the likelihood of significant national drug reform in the near