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<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2970/luis_fernando_c225rdenas_noam/">http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/2970/luis_fernando_c225rdenas_noam/</a><br>
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<p>...[The drug war in the U.S. is] a way of getting rid of a
superfluous population. There is a very close race/class
correlation—not perfect but close—and in fact, black males are
being removed. If it were in Colombia, they’d call it <i>limpieza
social</i>. Here they put them in jails. </p>
<p>Since the drug war started, there’s been a very sharp increase in
incarceration rates; the <span class="caps">U.S.</span>’s
incarceration rate is way beyond maybe five, ten times as high as
comparable countries, and its target is primarily black males,
Hispanic males, some women, some whites—very disproportionately to
the population. After all, think of the history of this country.
After the Emancipation Proclamation, there were about 10 years in
which blacks were formally sort of free, and then slavery was
reintroduced by incarceration. By the 1870s the states had passed
laws, and federal government approved them, in which essentially
black life was criminalized. If a black man was found standing on
a street corner, he could be arrested for vagrancy. If somebody
claimed he looked the wrong way at a white woman, he’d be
incarcerated for attempted rape. Pretty soon, you had the black
male population mostly in jail, and they were a slave labor force.
A lot of the American industrial revolution was based on slave
labor from leased prisoners in <span class="caps">U.S. </span>steel,
the mines. </p>
<p>This went on until the Second World War, when there was a need
for labor. There was a post-war boom, and during that period black
men could begin to integrate into the work force and get a job in
an auto plant—a fairly decent job with wages—buy a house, send
their kids to school, and so on. Well, by the ‘70s it was over.
The economy was being financialized, production was being
exported, there was a rust belt developing where the manufacturing
jobs were essentially no longer available. So what do you do with
the black population? Well, the answer was throw them back in jail
under the pretext of the drug war...</p>
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