Crack Music: Race and Economic Inequality Explained
“How we stop the Black Panthers? Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer.” This is the first line from the Kanye West song Crack Music - from his Grammy winning album Late Registration. When most think of the Black Panther Party to which West is referring, they think of a radical, militant, anti-police, black civil rights organization. However, the Party was much more. In 1966, the Party released their Ten-Point Program. In this document they demanded full employment for Black Americans, an end to the “robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities,” and a decent education for black people that teaches an accurate history of our people, to name a few relevant points (Newton). …show more content…
It also effectively removed a large number of Blacks from the job market and created a virtual caste system. When the number of educated or skilled Black workers increased, the job market was highly saturated creating competition between equally qualified Blacks and whites. Mass incarceration was a tool to exclude Blacks from the labor market or at the very least delegate them to low-income positions. As aforementioned, the War on Drugs led to a series of harsh policies, such as an expansion of crimes classified as felonies and hefty minimum sentences for certain crimes. The increase in the number of ways to become a felon and the restrictions placed upon them has eliminated almost any chance of upward mobility in the lives of those labeled a felon. Once one is labeled a felon it is legal to discriminate against them in their search for both employment and housing, essentially making felon “the new n-word,” and delegating felons to a second-class citizenship reminiscent of Blacks living in the Jim Crow South (Kilgore). The legal barriers to societal and workforce reentry, coupled with propaganda that reinforces the fallacious perception that Black Americans have a higher predilection to criminal activity than white Americans, has essentially constrained Black ex-offenders to a life of poverty and a caste status comparable to the “untouchables” of …show more content…
Although this nation was created with the hopes of equal opportunity and freedom for all, it quickly became a place of have and have-nots, one profiting and exploiting the other. This country was built on the free labor of African captives, and continues to exploit the labor of Blacks and the middle and lower classes. The phrase “the rich get richer” couldn’t be more accurate, with recent studies proving that a student’s socioeconomic background has a larger influence on their future success than their intelligence or talent. The vast wage gap that exists between most middle and low class Black Americans and the top earning Americans, coupled with the disproportionate arrest rates in the black community have created a chasm of inequality that may never be closed. The United States government (allegedly) used drugs to create a crack epidemic that resulted in the death, poverty, or arrest of millions of Americans. As Kanye West put it “we’ve been hanging from the same tree ever since.” He is alluding to the lynching that slaves and Blacks living in the Jim Crow south were subject to. Lynching was a form a punishment for slaves but it was also a tool for white Americans to instill fear in the hearts of Blacks and to maintain the status quo. The tree is a metaphor for this capitalist society and this country’s government. In 2016 that same tree is definitely still lynching
“How we stop the Black Panthers? Ronald Reagan cooked up an answer.” This is the first line from the Kanye West song Crack Music - from his Grammy winning album Late Registration. When most think of the Black Panther Party to which West is referring, they think of a radical, militant, anti-police, black civil rights organization. However, the Party was much more. In 1966, the Party released their Ten-Point Program. In this document they demanded full employment for Black Americans, an end to the “robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities,” and a decent education for black people that teaches an accurate history of our people, to name a few relevant points (Newton). …show more content…
It also effectively removed a large number of Blacks from the job market and created a virtual caste system. When the number of educated or skilled Black workers increased, the job market was highly saturated creating competition between equally qualified Blacks and whites. Mass incarceration was a tool to exclude Blacks from the labor market or at the very least delegate them to low-income positions. As aforementioned, the War on Drugs led to a series of harsh policies, such as an expansion of crimes classified as felonies and hefty minimum sentences for certain crimes. The increase in the number of ways to become a felon and the restrictions placed upon them has eliminated almost any chance of upward mobility in the lives of those labeled a felon. Once one is labeled a felon it is legal to discriminate against them in their search for both employment and housing, essentially making felon “the new n-word,” and delegating felons to a second-class citizenship reminiscent of Blacks living in the Jim Crow South (Kilgore). The legal barriers to societal and workforce reentry, coupled with propaganda that reinforces the fallacious perception that Black Americans have a higher predilection to criminal activity than white Americans, has essentially constrained Black ex-offenders to a life of poverty and a caste status comparable to the “untouchables” of …show more content…
Although this nation was created with the hopes of equal opportunity and freedom for all, it quickly became a place of have and have-nots, one profiting and exploiting the other. This country was built on the free labor of African captives, and continues to exploit the labor of Blacks and the middle and lower classes. The phrase “the rich get richer” couldn’t be more accurate, with recent studies proving that a student’s socioeconomic background has a larger influence on their future success than their intelligence or talent. The vast wage gap that exists between most middle and low class Black Americans and the top earning Americans, coupled with the disproportionate arrest rates in the black community have created a chasm of inequality that may never be closed. The United States government (allegedly) used drugs to create a crack epidemic that resulted in the death, poverty, or arrest of millions of Americans. As Kanye West put it “we’ve been hanging from the same tree ever since.” He is alluding to the lynching that slaves and Blacks living in the Jim Crow south were subject to. Lynching was a form a punishment for slaves but it was also a tool for white Americans to instill fear in the hearts of Blacks and to maintain the status quo. The tree is a metaphor for this capitalist society and this country’s government. In 2016 that same tree is definitely still lynching