Cory Booker and the Crime Bill Myth

Most Democrats now believe something like this: The White Democratic establishment put millions of Blacks behind bars so they could win some racist White votes. They were the architects of mass incarceration. Senator Booker accused Joe Biden of this in the second debate —

You stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of [White] people elected but destroyed [Black] communities like mine. 

A few days earlier he had labeled Biden “an architect of mass incarceration.” (Trump’s War Room posted videos of Booker saying these things to back up their attack ads on Biden.)

Can you think of anything more racist? 

Can you think of any better way to sabotage the Democratic Party than this crime bill myth? It claims that most of the Party’s most famous leaders (including Pelosi, Schumer, and Sanders who also voted for the 1994 crime bill) were actually such horrible racist that they destroyed all the Black urban communities to win racist votes?

Trump is about the only person who I can think of that would lie like that. So who did this?

This myth got its the biggest boost from Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, and a radical-left Democrat. It’s been promoted in all the radical left news outlets, such as The Nation and Huff Post. (See Ch. 7 in How Democrats Win (free)) They have been hugely effective at damaging Biden, the Clintons, and the Democratic Party, and if this election is close, they may elect Trump again.

So why is this myth wrong? Here are 10 examples.

Black communities were devastated by heroin in the 1960s and ‘70s, and by crack cocaine in the 1980s and ‘90s. These epidemics were accompanied by devastating crime waves. 

The Black middle class and working class were forced by segregated housing to suffer through these disasters. They had been working their butts off to get out of poverty in spite of racism and found the situation totally unfair (which it was). They advocated tough on crime measures. Sympathetic White politicians backed up their demands and helped pass tough crime bills including any crime-prevention measures they could get.

Don’t take my word for it. David Cole, the highly progressive National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, reviewed the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Locking Up Our Own, by James Forman Jr., the son of a prominent civil rights leader. He served as a public defender in Washington, D.C., during the passage of the 1994 crime bill. As Cole explains, 

Forman’s moving account … shows that some of the most ardent proponents of tough-on-crime policies in the era that brought us mass incarceration were Black politicians and community leaders who supported these policies, to protect them from the all-too-real scourges of crime and violence in many inner-city communities. 

Here’s Forman’s first example of Black tough-on-crime politics. David Clarke, a White civil rights activist on the Washington, D.C. city council, tried to decriminalize marijuana in DC. Douglas Moore, a Black civil rights activist associated with Stokely Carmichael’s [radical] Black United Front, was opposed. So was the city’s black clergy as well as John Fauntleroy, one of the city’s first black judges. [#1] The Black council member voted down Clarke’s decriminalization proposal. They knew marijuana arrests were discriminatory, but they felt marijuana was a gateway drug to heroin.

There’s a huge amount of evidence for this phenomenon in both Locking Up Our Own and The Black Silent Majority by Michael Fortner, Academic Director of Urban Studies, City University of New York. (He remembers “sleeping with my wallet under my pillow just in case addicts in my family became desperate for a hit in the midnight hour.”) You can also learn about this from many investigative journalists. But let me give you a few big-picture examples.

Reagan’s 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse (Crack Cocaine) Act

• Representative Charles Rangel from Harlem was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and its third chairman (1974 − 76). In 1989 Ebony magazine was calling him the “front-line general in the war on drugs.”
• Rangel was Chairman of the House Committee on Narcotics Abuse from 1983–1993.
• [#2] He lobbied for increased funds for state prisons in Reagan’s 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (see photo of him below as Reagan signs the Act.)
• Reagan and the House reduced the threshold amount of crack for a 5-year minimum sentence from 500 grams to 10 grams. Biden and two other Senators suggested a further reduction to 5 grams. That was accepted.
• [#3] The Congressional Black Caucus voted 11 to 10 in favor of the Act.
• [#4] None of the Black Caucus members charged that the crack/powder disparity was racially unfair even though several had long histories of distinguished opposition to any public policy that smacked of racial injustice.