Argument Essay On Jim Crow Laws. Literature & Language Essay

New Jim Crow Laws
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How Can We Bridge the Differences that Divide Us
It is undeniable that our American society is largely fragmented. The fragmentation is mainly along racial lines and though superficially it seems that American citizens are equal, a more critical look shows there is a racial wedge that continues to divide us. There is sufficient evidence to show that there is a system that divides the American society and though it continues to snap the cords of equality amongst Americans, it is obscured from view by a web of legal filters such that it is nearly invisible. It is a system CITATION Ale10 \l 1033 (Alexander, 2010)calls the new Jim Crow era in America. The old Jim Crow differentiated Americans on racial lines and discriminated against the people of color. The new Jim Crow laws are very similar to the old discriminative system. It has just evolved and uses the government machinery to continue targeting the people of color and instituting a structural problem that continues to suppress their upward mobility.
According to CITATION Ale10 \l 1033 (Alexander, 2010), the Black American community is still being discriminated and its upward mobility stifled by a system to incarcerate Blacks on a large scale. She claims that the government fashioned the war on drugs and used it to continue targeting African Americans and putting them behind bars. The system which is nearly 4 decades old was conceived in Reagan's era and it has led to the highest number of Black American incarceration in history. It is not necessarily that the Blacks do more crimes but because they were vulnerable in the face of the legislations that Reagan passed. First, they were economically disadvantaged because of the historical injustices they have suffered. Thus, taking the drugs to the streets they were likely to hang on to them and use them to help themselves financially. According to CITATION Ale10 \l 1033 (Alexander, 2010), ‘the CIA admitted in 1998 that guerilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs into the United States drugs that were making their way onto the streets of inner-city Black neighborhoods in the form of crack cocaine.’ Thus, the Black community was predisposed to find, use and peddle crack cocaine despite the inherent danger of possessing, using or peddling these drugs. The business was too lucrative for the Black community to ignore. After hooking the community to these drugs, the very government which overlooked the system which littered the streets of Black community with crack cocaine descends on the victims with a hard fist. Rather than cutting out the supply, they descend on the victims targeted by the drug lords (CIA soldiers) and puts as many as they can behind bars. Thus, the government creates a problem and then descends on its victims. The problem is also not evenly distributed across all ethnic communities in America, but it only targets the Blacks who are helpless in its face.
The government fashioned a tool that would continue suppressing the people of color. First, they introduce drugs in predominantly Black neighborhoods and crack on the lawbreakers. Rather than devising a system to keep the drugs of the streets, they allowed the drugs to remain in the streets but arrested anyone who came in contact with them. Though the drug problem hit the Black neighborhoods as hard as the white neighborhood, they targeted the Black community and sentenced them to long prison sentences. At the surface, it was a war on drugs, but a critical analysis of how the war was being fought showed that the government was ...