Carl Hart High Price Analysis

In 1981, the infamous Lee Atwater detailed how Nixon gained political power by using deracialized language to maintain racialized stereotypes. Largely, this tactic was employed by attributing poverty to black people and then demonizing poverty or social programs that would serve to benefit those experiencing poverty. This serves as the new form of racism. Because actually passing laws to explicitly negatively affect black people would be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, the maintenance of racial hierarchy comes indirectly in the form of dog-whistling, particularly with respect to drug laws. Investigation of the racialized treatment of drug laws in America demonstrates a system that disproportionately targets black Americans to the detriment of both their social and political power. …show more content…
In High Price, Dr. Carl Hart details his observations of the effect of drugs in the black community. Though contending that the black community was negatively affected by alcohol abuse, he claims that the most damaging fact of drug use was getting caught and facing the legal repercussions. This claim is largely motivated by comparisons he draws between himself and his childhood friends. Though both he and his friends both engaged in cocaine or marijuana use, Hart did so while serving in the Air Force in Japan and escaped drug testing, while his friends did so in 1980’s America. In 1996, Hart went on to be the only black man in America that year to be awarded a PhD in neuroscience, while many of his friends were confined to lives of dealing drugs because prior drug arrests precluded other professional opportunities (Hart 2013). By selectively enforcing drug laws and tying drug violations to economic mobility, the Drug War serves to disproportionately revoke professional and economic opportunities of the black community, thereby increasing or at least maintaining a sense of racial economic