Target: Police and Correctional System
President Obama’s Justice Department is also targeting police forces and the correctional system.
It is well known that blacks make up 40 percent of inmates in federal prisons—far beyond their
13 percent within the general population. To the Obama administration, this is “disparate impact”
and thus proof of entrenched racism within the police and the justice system.
Recently some people have been pushing back against this idea that police are, on average,
racists, or that teachers are, on average, racists. As a response, the White House has promoted
the concept
of “unconscious racism” and “
unconscious bias.” This is the idea that police, teachers
—white people in general—are racist in their actions, but not knowingly so.
It is similar to the idea that
white people can’t fully understand
what racism is because they have never experienced it.
For an idea of what President Obama is working toward, consider his July 16 trip to an Oklahoma
correctional facility. While there he told six inmates that “but for the grace of God,” it could have
been him in jail because he used to smoke weed and do cocaine as a youth. He said the reason they
were there and that other Americans weren’t was because they didn’t have the support systems the rest
of us have. He quoted the inmates as urging America to consider
what it could have done to reach them before they were incarcerated.
The implication is that racist America is at least partially to blame.
If you are part of a police force in a city that is 40 percent black and 60 percent white—the number
of arrests and convictions had better be 40 percent black and 60 percent white. Already the Justice
Department is prosecuting various police forces for supposed disparate impact on minority communities.
Again, “disparate impact” does not consider alternative reasons for any disparity.It is the proof
of racism.Drug and alcohol abuse is higher within the African American community than the general
populace. Thus it would be expected that more African Americans would be arrested for drug use.
But this does not matter. What matters is that
arrests and convictions match race population profiles.
