Invisible Racism

Maybe we should henceforth refer to "systemic racism" as "invisible racism." It's there, but you just can't see it. Just like an aspirin dissolving in water; it's still there, just less obvious to the eye.

Now, in 2021, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement are seen as positive and necessary. This makes it difficult to imagine that in the 1960s, when they were active, they weren't quite as popular, particularly in America's southern states. Last year we saw history repeating, when BLM and AntiFa protests were depicted as violent riots, described even as "domestic terrorism," which is the exact same thing that happened with both the Civil Rights Movement and the Hippie Movement in the 1960s; in the media, and even in Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, domestic violence, as well as drug abuse, were linked to these movements. Here's a sentence from one of Nixon's "law and order" ads:

Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.

"The first civil right"... If that's not a direct play on the protests by the Civil Rights Movement, I don't know what is. The ad is linked below, and is full of pictures showing protesters and police failing at their their job of maintaining "law and order", and of course most of the protesters shown are white. Like I said, the American right had two popular enemies back then, and the second was the Hippie Movement protesting against the war efforts in Vietnam. During his presidency, which lasted until his resignation in 1974 after Watergate, he started the "war on drugs." Some historical context is needed her; Nixon presided over the waning days of the Vietnam war, a war that not only cost 60,000 US lives, but severely damaged America's reputation abroad. This sparked a massive anti-war culture in the United States with the civil rights, black liberation and hippie movements as its main public outlets. This created two powerful dissenting forces for the administration: blacks and hippies.

Nixon's aide on domestic affairs, John Ehrlichman, had a plan for them. The author of 1996's "Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure," wrote in Harper's Magazine in 2016 that while researching his book, Ehrlichman gave a reason for the war on drugs that had little to do with protecting Americans from drugs. Here's what he said:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
_{source: Harper's Magazine}

That's how you dissolve a racist aspirin to make it less visible, but not less effective. Nowhere in the law does it say "hippie" or "black person", but fact is that it was invented to disrupt, criminalize and jail them. With great success, to this day. Ronald Reagan even updated and maintained the effectiveness of these laws by adding a distinction between crack cocaine and powder cocaine when he signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, in the knowledge that the former is used way more in poor minority neighborhoods. From an article by a Master Student in Crime and Criminal Justice from Leiden University, The Netherlands:

Ever wonder what the difference is between crack-cocaine and powder-cocaine? Aside from being cheaper, more potent, and predominantly used by lower-class minorities, crack will land you a prison sentence that is 100 times greater in comparison to cocaine. That's right, in the US, a person found holding 500 grams of powder cocaine – which is A LOT of cocaine – would face a five-year mandatory minimum sentence; crack offenders would have to be in possession of a mere 5 grams to face the same obligatory sentence.
_{source: Universiteit Leiden}

This is but one example though. The same can be said about some voter registration laws; it's not racist at all to request or mandate identification when voting. And the reason given isn't racist at all; supposedly voter ID legislation is there to combat voter fraud. But when we consider that voter fraud is "vanishingly rare, and certainly nowhere near the numbers necessary to have an effect on any election," alarm bells should ring. When states demand very specific photo ID's known to be used less by certain demographics, when they close ballot boxes on days and times they're used by certain demographics, if they increase the distance certain demographics have to travel to reach a ballot box, they never have to name those certain demographics while still suppressing their turnout effectively.

Virtually all the major scholarship on voter impersonation fraud–based largely on specific allegations and criminal investigations–has concluded that it is vanishingly rare, and certainly nowhere near the numbers necessary to have an effect on any election (Bailey, 2008; Hasen, 2012; Hood and Gillespie, 2012; Minnite, 2010, 2013). To give one idea of the scale: a review of allegations in the 2008 and 2010 elections in Texas found only four complaints of voter impersonation, out of more than 13 million votes cast, and it is not clear whether any of the complaints actually led to a prosecution (Minnite, 2013:101). By contrast, the 2000 presidential election almost certainly was altered by poor ballot design in Palm Beach County, which resulted in at least 2,000 voters who intended to vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman casting their ballots for Pat Buchanan by mistake (Wand et al., 2001).
_{source: Alien Abduction and Voter Impersonation in the 2012 US General Election}

This is systemic racism in a nutshell. In the highly individualist mindset of many modern conservatives and libertarians, the political right, racism only exists in one-on-one relations and interactions. Seeing how systemic racism is a product of the political right, I often wonder if that's the only reason they so adamantly deny its existence. Ben Shapiro, for example, is a hack, but he's not dumb, AND he graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007 cum laude; he surely knows better, or at least he SHOULD know better. Linked below is his debunking of systemic racism debunked.

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