Thoughts of White girls and Black males 'Sagging' and how America would treat them differently.

I thought I had seen and heard it all in America. I thought the absurdity of racism could never be topped after the fiasco of the 'Federal Sentencing Guidelines'. For several generations, Black and Latina/Latino youth in the U.S. have been shipped off to prison in numbers never before seen anywhere in the world at any time. More than 2 million people, of all nationalities languish in prison, more than fifteen times the number 50 years ago. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prison population and more than 60% of those in U.S. prisons are Black or Hispanic. 33% of Black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are in prison, on parole or probation on any given day. More than 80,000 people in prison are held in solitary confinement under conditions that fit the international definition of torture.

The United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails (guess what race is featured predominantly?) -- a 500% increase over the past thirty years. Alongside this has risen a massive program of criminally prosecuting undocumented immigrants, essentially hidden from public view. As a result of the devastation of their homelands, these immigrants have been driven to this country to work without papers, and today they are being criminalized. The US chastises other countries for human rights violations, yet it enmeshes the lives of tens of millions of people in its 'criminal justice' system. The courts, cops, prisons and La Migra all play a part in enforcing mass incarceration. There is a genocidal logic to this program, and it has been gathering momentum, and which, if it isn’t stopped, will get much worse!

Mass incarceration has grown beside the criminalization of whole peoples; a situation in which every African-American or Latino is a permanent suspect and treated as guilty until proven innocent by police and racist vigilantes, making it hard for them just to survive long enough to prove their innocence. This is especially concentrated among the youth, starting with cops in schools, arresting children for things that used to mean a visit to the principal’s office at worse, putting youth on a trajectory from school to prison. Black and Latino youth have a target on their backs in this society. Literally tens of millions of lives have been scarred and worse – both the direct victims, and as a consequence, their families and communities. People who heroically resisted these and other injustices have been imprisoned, some of them for decades. These political prisoners must be freed.

The malignancy of mass incarceration did not arise from a sudden epidemic of crime nor did it result from people making poor personal choices. Instead it arose from cold political calculations made in response to the massive and heroic struggle for the rights of Black and other minority peoples that took place in the 1960’s and 70’s, and in response to the enormous economic and social changes brought about by globalized production. When the forced and richly funded programs of Planned Parenthood failed, the Caucasian-American ruling class decided to clamp down, militarize the police, privatize the prisons (in the process, creating billions of dollars in profit for the military-industrial complex) and attempt to reduce the African-American population as drastically as they could.

This cancer of mass incarceration has been, from the beginning, nothing but a new Jim Crow in place of the old one. Like the old Jim Crow, it drew on, fed off and reinforced the deep-seated roots of the racism that grew up with slavery. Like the old Jim Crow, it has been, from the beginning, unjustifiable, utterly immoral and thoroughly illegitimate. So now, in the State that decreed that the unprovoked shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman was legal, a town has come up with a new, laughable and ludicrous way to incarcerate African-Americans. You will go to jail if your pants sag in Ocala, Florida. I am not one to support the buffoonery that constitutes sagging pants, but do you suppose if a dozen beautiful White girls are sagging their pants and showing off their bikinis, they will see the inside of a squad car (unless for some sexual propositioning) for a second? Get real. It makes me queasy both in its stupidity and ignorance, but to have to serve jail time for this? What is next? Jail time if you have an afro? Jail time if your grammatical syntax hints at Ebonics? Where does it all end? To what lengths is America willing to go to prove how racist it really is?