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Photo Credit by Kevin Lamarque|REUTER
By Nehemiah Frank
The Return of Law and Order
Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump promised Republicans, he would be the president of law and order — tough on crime. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent,” said he, followed by “I am the law and order candidate.”
Michelle Alexander’s best-seller entitled The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, elevated that it was the harsh policy of President Richard Nixon’s Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 that ignited the mass incarceration and overpopulated prisons we have today. President Nixon’s drug policies along with the next several presidents’ continuance, of said policy, placed a horrific strain on the black American family.
In minority communities, the phrase law and order equates to racial profiling of black and brown lives. Usually, this type of predatorial policing takes place in depressed areas of less economic opportunity which are commonly black and brown neighborhoods. For example, North Tulsa, Okla., Ferguson, Mo., and Chicago’s South Side all areas densely populated by African-Americans.
Within 20 days after being elected, President Donald Trump wasted no time in committing to his campaign promise; (R-Ala.) Senator, Jeff Sessions was sworn in as the United States Attorney General on February 9, 2017, replacing former Obama Administration appointees’ Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch who both worked determinedly against an already cemented systematic racist institution. Their ambitions were to dismantle America’s prison industrial complex and private prison corporations from the top down. Sadly, their goals were deterred by the election of President Donald J. Trump.
Contextualizing Jeff Sessions’s Background with the African-American Community
AG Sessions new policies will inevitably increase an already exhausted and overpopulated prison system. His new policies will be like Black Codes and Jim Crow Law’s on steroids – in a nation that holds 4.34% of the world’s population, yet incarcerates 25% of the world’s prison population.
Needless to say, appointing him to the position of AG proved difficult and came with much controversy. First, Caretta Scott King, the late wife of civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., formed negative dispositions of Sessions’s character; moreover, Mrs. King had reasonable concerns in regaurds to his level of integrity, which was based upon issues black voters were encountering due to Sessions antagonistic dealings with black suffrage. Her inclination, that the end goal of Sessions was to disenfranchise the black vote inevitably locking them out from seats of power and influence. Henceforth, she took her fustration to the pen and wrote a strong letter, addressed to (R – S.C.) Senator James Storm Thurman describing Sessions as man with questionable morals and that placing Sessions in a position of high power could be a detriment to civil rights and progression in America. (Read Letter Here)
Sessions has even been quoted too referring to civil rights organizations as “un-American” and that this groups “force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.” This now includes Black Lives Matter!
Local Groups Combating Racialized Policies
Groups like Racism Stinks and Black Lives Matter are aware of these dangerous policies and believe the changes are a blow to civil rights legislation passed under the Obama Administration.
“It will significantly affect black lives in a negative capacity. For someone to get sentenced more time for crack, when it has less than the amount of cocaine drug in it, that doesn’t even make sense. It will increase racial profiling, and it’s not a step forward,” says Richard Baxter who is the founder and president of Racism stinks, a nonprofit, which has programs geared towards eradicating racism in the Tulsa community and bridging transparency with an understanding between Tulsa’s black community and Tulsa Police Department.
Racism Stinks will host their 3rd Annual Skunk Run; The Race to End Racism on Memorial Day Weekend and is encouraging Tulsa to come together as one. For more information click the link below.
