Tag: Race

Sociopolitical Hierarchies and Biology

Sociopolitical Hierarchies and Biology

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes the argument that studying biology is insufficient for understanding human society. We cannot understand the complex human societies and different cultures of the world purely by studying the biology of humans. Testing humans on physiological and psychological metrics does provide us with interesting information, but it doesn’t explain exactly why so many differences are seen across cultures and places. It also doesn’t explain why certain hierarchies exist within different cultures across the globe.
 
 
To understand complex societies, Harari argues, we have to understand history, context and circumstance, and power relations. By doing so, we can begin to understand the structures within societies that shape the institutions that humans have created, and that ultimately shape the behaviors, opportunities, incentives, and motivations for humans. “Since the biological distinctions between different groups of Homo sapiens are, in fact, negligible, biology can’t explain the intricacies of Indian society or American racial dynamics,” writes Harari.
 
The two examples that Harari uses to demonstrate culture and society relative to biology demonstrate how chance historical events created unique circumstances that shaped different institutions that are highly influential within certain societies, but are unrecognizable outside those societies. Brahmins and Shudras are not understood as different races, but as different castes within Indian society, with substantial discrimination between the two groups. Racial discrimination has been a driving factor of American economic and political society. However, caste systems are nearly completely absent in the United States and the racial discrimination in the United States is not present in India. The explanations for the caste system and the racial dynamics are not biologically based, but culturally based – dependent on power and institutions.
 
Harari writes, “most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.” We see this when we look at recent challenges in the replication of psychological studies. Many of the findings from the field of psychology have come from studies involving college age students in the United States. Such individuals represent a very small segment of humanity. Generalizing from studies involving American college students will give us an inaccurate picture of the world – a picture that is not based on true biology, but on chance cultural factors specific to a unique population. We can easily make the mistake of believing that what we observe, either through a psychological study of American college students or through our own experiences with people in our community, state, or country, reflects a biological reality. However, what we observe is often the result of cultural differences or institutions and power structures that we are not consciously aware of.
 
Harari explains that this is what has happened with the Indian caste system and American racial dynamics. Cultural factors, chance historical events, and subsequent policies and institutions have created differences among people that we can observe and measure. However those differences are not based in biology. It is a mistake to attribute those differences to something innate in Homo sapiens or to assume that the way things are is the way that things should be. Quite often, our sociopolitical hierarchies have no logical or absolute reason for being the way they are.
Misperceptions About AFDC

Misperceptions About AFDC

Posted on by jabittan
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was the welfare system in the United States from the 1930’s to 1997 when it was eventually replaced with a new system for welfare. In the book $2.00 A Day authors Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer write about the history and legacy of AFDC to explore how America ended up in a place where so many people in our country still live in a poverty that many don’t believe could exist in the richest nation on earth.
One of the challenges, the authors note, about welfare programs in the United States is that most people have serious misperceptions about how the programs operate and who is being served by the programs. These misperceptions are worsened by our country’s troubled racial history, and narratives about welfare beneficiaries in some instances are more influential in the design and implementation of welfare programs than real facts.
Edin and Shaefer demonstrate that this was true of Ronald Reagan who focused on AFDC and presented a racialized stereotype of welfare beneficiaries. Reagan popularized the narrative of the welfare queen which the authors describe by writing, “she was black, decked out in furs, and riving her Cadillac to the welfare office to pick up her check.” This narrative played on racial stereotypes, fears, and the dehumanization of black and poor people.
Edin and Shaefer continue, “None of these stereotypes even came close to reflecting reality, particularly in regard to race. It was true that as of the late 1960’s and beyond, a disproportionate percentage of blacks participated in AFDC. But there was never a point at which blacks accounted for a majority of recipients. The typical AFDC recipient, even in Reagan’s day, was white.”
The racialized stereotypes were used to justify changes to the welfare system, less generous benefits, and to demonstrate the idea that aid to the needy actually harms them rather than helps them. A narrative that was based more on anecdote and fear than reality shaped public opinion, perception, and policy. Misperceptions about AFDC meant that policymakers and their constituents were focused more on the narrative of welfare and less on the actual needs, systems, structures, and institutions of those living in poverty and ways to help them improve their lives.
Poverty - $2.00 A Day - Kathryn Edin & H. Luke Shaefer

Who Experiences Deep Poverty

Posted on by jabittan
The image of deep poverty in the United States is unfairly and inaccurately racialized. For many people, it is hard to avoid associating words like poverty, ghetto, or poor with black and minority individuals and communities. For many, the default mental image for such terms is unavoidably non-white, and white poverty ends up taking on qualifiers to distinguish it as something separate from the default image for poverty. We use white-trash or something related to a trailer park to distinguish white poverty as something different than general poverty which is coded as black and minority.
This distinction, default, and mental image of poverty being a black and minority problem creates a lot of misconceptions about who is truly poor in America. In the book $2.00 A Day Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer write, “the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children [has] been on the rise since the nation’s landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996. … although the rate of growth [is] highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor [are] white.” (Tense changed from past to present by blog author)
Poverty, in public discourse and public policy, is often presented as a racial problem because we do not recognize how many white people in the United States live in poverty. The quote above shows that the racialized elements of our general view of poverty do reflect real differences in changing rates of poverty among minority groups, but also reveals that almost half – nearly a majority – of people in poverty are white.
The consequence is that policy and public opinion often approaches poverty from a race based standpoint, and not from an economic and class based standpoint. Policy is not well designed when it doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation, and public discourse is misplaced when it fails to accurately address the problems society faces. Biases, prejudices, and discriminatory practices can be propped up and supported when we misunderstand the nature of reality, especially when it comes to extreme poverty. Additionally, by branding only minorities as poor and carving out a special space for white poverty, we reducing the scope and seriousness of the problem, insisting that it is a cultural problem of inferior and deficient groups, rather than a by-product of an economic system or a manifestation of shortcomings of economic and social models. It is important that we recognize that poverty is not something exclusive to black and minority groups.
George Herriman and the Complexities of Racial Identity

George Herriman and the Complexities of Racial Identity

Posted on by jabittan
Race is a social construct. Genetic studies reveal how misplaced ideas of racial differences truly are. Individuals on the African continent sometimes have more genetic differences than individuals across continents, yet race throughout human history has been used, at a genetic level, to explain the differences between people, and in the worst of  times, to justify discrimination and biases. However, even though race is more of a social construct than a biological fact, humans still identify differences in appearance, customs, behaviors, and psychologies and treat individuals differently based on how they are perceived.
The book Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White demonstrates the power of this discriminatory way of identifying people, and how complex racial identities can be when we insist race is more than a social construct and use it to define people. Michael Tisserand, the book’s author, explains that Herriman existed at an intersection of white and black, and that he was able to pass as white to enter a professional world that excluded blacks. Doing so, however, meant that he had to abandon other identities, including those of his mixed Creole and black family from New Orleans.
In a sentence that demonstrates just how complex racial identification can be, Tisserand writes the following, “when questioned as part of court proceedings if he was colored, George Herriman Sr.’s {Herriman’s grandfather] brother in law, Charles Sauvinet, replied, when I go among strangers I am received as a gentleman. He added I never inquire whether I was received as a white or colored man.” Herriman’s family displayed ambiguous racial characteristics for several generations, and much of their racial identity was dependent more on how other people treated them than on how they chose to identify. Race was not within their own control and varied from place to place and situation to situation.
The implication in Charles Sauvinet’s response is that he was received as a white man, that people identified him and treated him as a white gentleman. His non-answer was effectively a way of saying he was white while simultaneously acknowledging that white did not capture the full complexity of his racial background. His identity, the race assigned to him, and whether he was considered a valuable and worthy gentleman or something less than was not dependent on his own personal qualities, but on how other people perceived his race. These ambiguous edge cases are helpful in exploring the role and power of race in the United States. The racial state of America today is improved over the days of Charles Sauvinet and George Herriman, but discrimination and racial bias still exists, and still fails to address the realities of people’s lived experiences and racial backgrounds, even if race is nothing more than a social construct.
Racial Passing

Racial Passing

Posted on by jabittan
The idea of passing is fairly common in the United States. A common American refrain is fake it till you make it, an idea that you can pretend to be something until you become that thing in reality. For white people in the United States this is a common strategy, especially among young or entrepreneurially ambitious individuals. In my own life, I have been guilty of passing to try to fit in with the cool kids in high school, as passing for someone who knows more than they do to try to get a job, and of passing to try to impress elders with deep knowledge when I only have surface deep knowledge. However, this kind of passing is different than racial passing, a type of passing that many people in the United States have turned to in order to get by. I was using passing to try to hide weaknesses and to try to impress others in an effort to improve my social status. I was not passing to try to avoid discrimination and prejudice.
Racial passing includes elements of trying to improve ones social, economic, and political status as I was trying to do, but not in the same fake it till you make it way. I was trying to work my way into social groups and jobs that I was mostly qualified for, but for which I might have some weaknesses. Racial passing is not about hiding weaknesses or being unskilled, it is about hiding ones racial background to prevent others from discriminating against you for no reason other than your skin color. Throughout American history, racial passing has also been a way to avoid violence against oneself and to preserve ones life, very different from any passing experiences I have had.
The book Krazy by Michael Tisserand is a biography of cartoonist George Herriman who spent most of his life in a state of racial passing, hiding his family heritage from everyone he knew. In the book he writes about Herriman’s passing in the following paragraph:
“Racial passing was – and remains – a controversial practice. Only a select number of blacks had the opportunity to pass. Although there are no existing photographs of George and Clara Herriman [George Herriman the cartoonist’s parents], photos of George Joseph Herriman reveal a shade of skin and general physical characteristics that might, to some eyes, render him racially ambiguous. Members of the Herriman family, it appears, were what some Creoles called nations able to present themselves in many different lights.” 
Herriman’s family tree included Creole, black, and white people from New Orleans in the decades before the Civil War. This unique racial background created the ambiguous racial appearance of George Herriman, allowing him to engage in racial passing.
Without being able to pass as white, Herriman would not have been able to get a job at a nation-wide newspaper and would not have had a nation-wide circulation for his comics. His art and skills were fantastic, but never would have been possible if he had not been able to hide his family background and pass as white. He found a lot of success as a cartoon artist and newspaper illustrator, allowing him to buy a home in a good neighborhood in Los Angeles. If he appeared more black or Creole he would not have been able to attain the same level of career success, would not have been able to buy a home and begin building wealth to pass along to his children, and might have been at risk of violence in an unlucky police encounter. This has been the cost of not being able to pass for many people throughout American history. On one hand for those who do pass, they risk alienation from their family and friends who cannot pass, having to hide their association with anyone who was not white out of fear of discovery. On the other hand, passing opened up a world free from discrimination and full of career, wealth, and general life possibilities. Passing has been much more than just trying to impress people to get ahead or be popular, it has been about living a life that would not be possible if one was identified differently based on their skin color.
The Long Lasting Legacy of American Racism

The Long-Lasting Legacy of American Racism

Posted on by jabittan
If you are white and don’t make an effort to study the history of racism in the United States it can be hard to imagine just how serious the country’s racist past is. In an age where a black man has been president, where black sports stars have multimillion dollar contracts, and when clear outward displays of racism are (almost) universally condemned, it is easy to believe that racism is a problem of the past. In our country we place a lot of weight on the idea that the individual is responsible for their own success. Whether it is their financial success, their physical shape and weight, or their intelligence, we put the determination and responsibility of the individual at the center of how we understand people, and that doesn’t leave room for racism. We look at successful black people and argue that racism can’t be a problem now, because clearly some black people have become successful. Racism, our current ideology says, can’t be holding people back anymore. The only thing that can be holding them back is a failure to take responsibility for their own actions. Racism is simply an excuse in this view.
However, if you are not white or if you make any effort to study racism in the United States, you see the long lasting legacy of American racism and how it continues to shape the lives of people today. Exclusionary housing policies of the past, policing policies, and education policies are areas where racism deliberately impacted the lived experiences of black people in the United States, clearly limiting opportunity and less clearly limiting the potential to pass on wealth and knowledge to future generations. The results of this discrimination never truly left us.
In his biography of 20th century cartoonist George Herriman, Michael Tisserand explores how the long lasting legacy of American racism can be seen in the life and work of George Herriman. Writing about New Orleans around the Civil War, a time when Herriman’s grandfather and father lived in the city, Tisserand writes, “From 1879 to 1917, there were no city-run public high schools available for blacks. Robert Mills Lusher, the state superintendent of education, infamously declared that the purpose of education was for white students to be properly prepared to maintain the supremacy of the white race.”
Herriman’s family left New Orleans for Los Angeles when he was 10, but throughout his life he hid the fact that he was of black and Creole descent. His light skin color allowed him to pass as white, and opened the door to a career in newspapers and comics. Without having light skin, and without having a family that could move him away from New Orleans, Herriman certainly wouldn’t have had the opportunities he did in California, and racism would have been the limiting factor.
Without studying American racism, it would be easy to look back at a time when there were no city-run public schools for blacks about a hundred years ago and dismiss that fact as irrelevant for the world today. If it had simply been an omission to teach black children, then the situation could have been rectified relatively easy, and black education could have gotten underway to prepare black children for the future. However, the quote shows that benign neglect was not there reason why there were not any schools for black children. It was deliberate racism, in full force from the highest levels of education in the state, that limited the educational opportunities for black people. This malignant attitude created the lack of schools, and it was not simply a matter of establishing schools to facilitate black education.
Opening schools would have been step one, but this would have been done 100 years ago in a climate that was actively hostile toward black students. It is not hard to imagine that high quality materials, resources, and educational opportunities, the things we would all want in our own children’s education, would have been rare among any black schools opened in this type of climate. Once you see the type of animosity that American racism fostered, by influential individuals like Robert Mills Lusher (who there is still a school named after), it is not hard to understand the long lasting legacy of such racism. Deliberate efforts to hold people down and create a system of supremacy for white people is not easily overturned, even 100 years later. The deliberate delays of educating black people has long-term consequences, as it takes time for educational opportunities to come along and for the people who receive good education to grow, accumulate wealth and power, and further invest in their communities. White people had this opportunity starting well over 100 years ago, but black people did not. Black people could not pass on their knowledge, could not connect their children with people to help advance their careers, and could not take on jobs that would help them build wealth that would support their families for generations to come. Instead they were constantly put down, blamed for their own failure, and never give the public support that while people developed for themselves and over time restricted under the premise of conservatism.
The Confederacy in New Orleans

The Confederacy in New Orleans

Posted on by jabittan
George Herriman was a cartoon artist famous for his Krazy Kat comic that ran from 1913 to 1944. Herriman wrote his comics at a time when black people did not have access to news rooms and careers in media. He was born to mixed race Creole parents in New Orleans, but throughout his life passed as white, hiding his parent’s ancestry and often hiding his hair and other features which may have made people question his racial heritage.
In the book Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White author Michael Tisserand explores the known history of Herriman’s family living in New Orleans before and during the Civil War. Herriman’s grandfather, George Herriman Sr., was a free black man living in New Orleans at the time of the Civil War. George Herriman (the grandson) was born in 1880 in New Orleans and his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 10, but the impact of the Civil War on his family and his family’s history in New Orleans left a lasting imprint on him that Tisserand traces throughout his career and work.
New Orleans was a place of incredible diversity in the Antebellum South and it was common for white men to have a wife and family and to also have a black mistress (or several) and a separate mixed-race but free family. There were legal marriage-like arrangements between many wealthy white men and their black mistresses. This is the history that George Herriman’s heritage traces back to. Tisserand  writes about the racial history of New Orleans and about the complex forces that drove Herriman Sr. to join the Confederate Army in New Orleans as the Civil War broke out. Herriman Sr. enlisted despite, as Tisserand writes, “the aims of the Confederacy were no secrete. Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition – stated Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens in his Cornerstone Speech.”
Herriman Sr., as a free black, man enlisted because it was clear that free black men in the city would be in danger at the outset of the war if they did not find a way to demonstrate that they were not going to violently rebel against the government in New Orleans and across the South. Tisserand continues, “the free designation in free people of color was quickly losing all meaning.”
He adds, “yet, it didn’t take long to realize that even volunteering for the army didn’t ensure respect. Free people of color were treated poorly in the Confederate States Army, with many receiving neither uniforms nor weapons.”
Tisserand includes these details and more about Herriman’s family to help explain why he pursued a strategy of passing and to inform the audience of certain characteristics of his psychology which translated into his art and comics. Herriman lived as a white man, afraid that society would discover his black and Creole family history. Thanks to the color of his skin he was able to escape the world of deliberate hate and discrimination that his father and grandfather had lived in, but the trauma they experienced never truly left his life. The complex and diverse mixture of New Orleans stuck with him, but was something he hid, similarly to the way the South attempted to hide the ideas expressed in Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech through the Lost Cause Narrative after the Civil War. Nevertheless, the lived experience of his father and grandfather during the Confederacy in New Orleans and the response that can be read through Herriman’s life and work demonstrates the complexity and racial challenges that influenced the development of life in New Orleans and across the south.
Race and Public Policy in the United States

Race and Public Policy in the United States

Posted on by jabittan
I was an undergrad at the University of Nevada when the Black Lives Matter movement first began to take shape. I didn’t have a deep understanding of race in the United States. I generally thought that since we didn’t use racial slurs directly toward minorities in public and since there were not any visibly active anti-minority groups and movements in the town where I grew up, that racism was over in the country, and no longer contributed to the inequalities between racial groups in America. Of course, I was very wrong.

 

At a certain point, our country stopped addressing race head on. Policies meant to specifically keep black people out of political power, separate from white spaces, and intended to limit black economic advancement were removed from the books across the country. What we refer to as Jim Crow laws were struck down, however they were never replaced with laws that would explicitly help the black people who had previously been harmed by public policy. What is more, our nation seemed to decide that if we couldn’t have laws directly targeting a racial minority in a negative manner, then we couldn’t have laws explicitly targeting race in any way, even if the laws sought to undue previous injustice and help advance real equality and equity.

 

The result was not a race neutral utopia where public policy was equal for everyone. The result has been a steady march of laws that appear to be race neutral, but clearly have disparate racial impacts. There may not be a single measure that anyone could point to in order to say, “That right there, is racism in action via public policy,” but the effects and intents of legislation often are not hidden very deeply.

 

In 2019 I did a mini dive into drug policy in the United States, and author Johann Hari in his book Chasing the Scream shows how drug policy was designed with explicit racial prejudices, even though drug policy was race neutral at face value. Hari describes the efforts of a man named John Marks, a psychiatrist in the UK, to provide drugs legally to drug addicts. The legally provided drugs were safer than drugs on the street, and when provided free to drug addicts, it prevented harm to the user, and reduced theft as people no longer needed to break into stores or mug people to obtain money for drugs. From this point, Marks could begin to work with the addicts to address their drug use and help them move forward in a more healthy way.

 

Many people hated his approach to drug addiction, and in the United States, whenever he traveled to discuss his radical approach to addiction, he was blocked by red tape and pressure from a congressman. Hari writes, “Everywhere they [Marks and his colleagues] went, at the end of the meeting, they were told the same thing – that the Republican congressman Jesse Helms had been pressuring the organizers to shut them down and shut them up. Helms didn’t want anybody to interfere with the war on drugs. A few years later, on a CNN phone-in show, a caller thanked him for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers, and he replied by saluting the camera and saying: well, thank you, I think.”

 

More on that call and on Helms can be found here. What I want to highlight from this quote is how race neutral drug policy was understood by people to be explicitly designed to hurt racial minorities. The caller understood that public policy that negatively targeted drug users and people with low socioeconomic status disproportionately affected non-white people, contributing to racial inequalities that presumably advanced the caller while limiting opportunities for people of color. It was not just an unfortunate consequence of drug policy that black people suffered, it was the goal.

 

Today we need to accept the realities that so many of our public policies have had. We need to accept that race neutral policy can have different impacts on different racial groups, and that such policies are not really race neutral. We need to address the realities that some groups have been politically favored and advantaged over others through out nation’s history, and we need to start implementing policies which will help racial minorities at disproportionate rates. It is important that we be honest about that reality when moving those policies forward. This requires a change in the way we think about race in this country. We have to move beyond the dismissive idea that all lives matter, and specifically address the harms that have been done to racial minorities by recognizing that black lives matter, and that all lives won’t matter until we recognize that black lives do matter. We must use the energy of the present moment to change the ways we think about race and public policy in the United States, and redesign programs that have historically contributed to racial inequality.
A Racist Start to the Drug War

A Racist Start to the Drug War

Posted on by jabittan
My last post was about Harry Anslinger’s racist views and how they influenced public policy. I wanted to focus on what we could learn from his mistakes, and how we could think about our own policy positions given the terrors we have seen in the past from biased policy positions, confirmation bias, and believing things are true simply because we want them to be true.

 

Today’s post is more specifically just an examination of race and drug policy, looking all the way back to the start of the war on drugs. During a time when protests against racial violence in policing is front and center, I think it is helpful to consider how race was specifically used in drug wars to hurt racial minorities, especially black men and women. Black lives matter, but our nation has not always believed that, and we cannot separate the disparities in racial sentencing, death rates, and wealth from the policies of our nation’s past.

 

In his book Chasing the Scream, Johan Hari writes about his shock at finding that the drug war, in its early days, was not so much about mitigating drug addiction or preventing new addiction in teenagers, as it is today, but about controlling racial minorities. He cites overtly racist headlines in newspapers and talks about Anslinger’s efforts to target minority populations, while letting white drug users off the hook and helping them find treatment to wean off drugs. A central character in the book is Billie Holiday, a black musician targeted by Anslinger for her drug use. Her story provides a window into the racialized tactics used to enforce drug laws, and create a nationwide story about the danger of black people using drugs.

 

Hari writes, “Many white Americans did not want to accept that black Americans might be rebelling because they had lives like Billie Holiday’s – locked into Pigtowns and banned from developing their talents. It was more comforting to believed that a white powder was the cause of black anger, and that getting rid of the white powder would render black Americans docile and on their knees again.”  The failure of black Americans to become successful was blamed on drugs, and ultimately on a genetic and/or cultural inferiority that justified their low social positions and justified a drug war waged against them. White American’s didn’t want to believe that they could be held responsible for the strife of African Americans, so they invented new excuses for racist policies.

 

As we look around the country today, we should keep these kinds of policies and views in mind. It was not that long ago that we were so openly racist in the development of policies that are still impacting the world today. We can no longer justify racial disparities by saying that there is some type of problem with minorities that justifies the disparities in our policies and outcomes. We need to demonstrate that black lives matter and advance policies that correct the wrongs of our past.
Racially Motivated Policy

On the Dangers of Racially Motivated Public Policy

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Chasing the Scream, Johann Hari writes about Harry Anslinger, the Nation’s first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger was a staunch anti-drug crusader, but he also held deeply racist views which came to influence his opinions about drug use and national policy related to specific drugs. In many ways, it was Anslinger’s racist views that created a national prohibition on marijuana, and lead to years of laws prosecuting marijuana use and racially disparate arrests.

 

Early in his career, Anslinger wasn’t very interested in marijuana. He was more focused on heroin and cocaine, but Hari explains that heroin and cocaine use was not wide spread enough in the American population to justify the size of his agency. As newspapers began to report on crime related to black and brown people in the United States who had used marijuana, Anslinger seized on the opportunity to demonize the drug. Hari writes, “almost overnight, he began to argue the opposite position. Why? He believed the two most-feared groups in the United States – Mexican immigrants and African Americans – were taking the drug much more than white people.”

 

Despite evidence from researchers and physicians indicating that marijuana use generally did not lead to the atrocities that Anslinger began to claim, he pushed forward with harsh drug policies related to marijuana, policies that he knew would have a racially disparate impact. At a certain point, in the picture Hari presents, it appears that Ansligner began to believe what he wanted and see what he wanted in the world around him. After he proved how dangerous the mafia was in the United States, contrary to the view of many experts, he began to believe his own rhetoric about racial inferiority and marijuana dangers. Hari writes, “Anslinger began to believe all his hunches would turn out like this. He only had to defy the experts and keep using his instinct until, finally, he would be shown to be more right than anyone could have predicted.”

 

Anslinger was clearly wrong, and his stance and attitude are easy to denounce today. But what we should learn from his story is just how dangerous public policy can be when it is motivated by racist values and hatred. For many of us today, we believe our values are high minded, and we believe that the policies we favor can have no downside. Nevertheless, we can still learn from the example of Anslinger and the resulting racial problems his policies created in the Untied States.

 

We need to be honest with ourselves and those around us about the values that drive our policy decisions. We should be honest about the potential failure points of the policy we support, and we should acknowledge that there are potential negatives of what we do. This requires that we recognize the message we are trying to push, and avoid simply looking for examples in the world that confirm what we already want to believe. If our values are indeed high-minded, and if we can be open and honest about our motivations, then our policies should be supported by a larger audience. Failing to be honest and open can put us in a place where we defend bad policy, and push for policies that explicitly hurt others, without us acknowledging the downsides. It is also critical that we acknowledge the role that race plays (or has the potential to play) in the policies and attitudes we support. The same reflection and honesty regarding our policies must apply to the racial outcomes of the policies we favor, and we have to push back against policies with disparate negative outcomes for minority groups.