WATCH: Ta-Nehisi Coates' Opening Statement in Reparations Congressional Hearing

#MUSTREAD: Vox Report On Mass Incarceration In USA

Over at Vox today there is a must-read feature analyzing the United States public policy of mass incarceration, despite drops in crime rates. The feature puts the issue in perspective by using 28 charts to illustrate the devastating human toll of the  relentless increase in the prison-industrial complex in America.

America is number one — in incarceration. Over the past several decades, the country has built the largest prison population in the entire world, with the second-highest prison population per capita behind the tiny African country of Seychelles. But how did it get this way? Although it may be easy to blame one specific event, the US's path to incarceration was decades in the making — involving politicians as varied as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.

Go read it yourself, right now!

The Boston Bombers Were White. Any Questions?

As is the case whenever an event or incident which causes America to consider it's founding principles and self-identity, notions of race appear soon afterwards. Now that the pictures of Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev,  the perpetrators of the first completed terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, are ubiquitously distributed, one question being asked is: Are the Boston Bombers White?

Peter Beinart says the answer to this question is clearly yes in a thoughtful piece in The Daily Beast in which he discussed the historical shifting of racial categories in America, especially the conflation of racialization with religious affiliation.

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

[...]

Think about American history and you can understand why. For centuries, Americans were legally segregated by race. Thus, when newcomers from the Middle East came to our shores, Americans had to decide which side of the line they were on. And in the struggle to be classified as white, Middle Eastern Christians had an advantage: Jesus. In the 1915 case Dow v. United States, a Syrian Christian successfully argued that he was white because Jesus, the original Middle Eastern Christian, was too.

[...]

Today, Americans still often link Islam and dark skin. What’s changed is which category we consider more dangerous. For much of American history, the problem with being Muslim was that you weren’t considered white. Since 9/11, by contrast, one of the problems with not being considered white is that you might be mistaken for Muslim.

[...]

You can also glimpse this conflation of religion and race in the demand, which surfaces after every terrorist attack, to single out Muslims for special scrutiny at airports and the like. Often, the politicians and pundits most eager to profile Muslims are the same folks who in the 1980s and 1990s defended the “racial profiling” of blacks. And listening to them, you sometimes get the sense that they think the process would work the same way: just look to see who the Muslims are.

You should really go read the entire piece yourself. The only part I would quibble with is that Beinart does not explicitly use language saying that race is a social construction, a figment of our society's imagination, although the notion of its fluidity is clear throughout his piece. Just saying so does not undermine the very real impact that race has on the lives of very real individuals, but acknowledging its fictional nature is important when discussing it.

What do you think?

Let's Talk About Gun Control!

The New York Times has a great op-ed by Nicholas Krystof today "Do We Have the Courage to Stop This?" where he brings up the topic of sensible gun control in light of the horrific massacre of 20 children under 10 and 7 adults at an elementary school in Newtown, CT on Friday morning.

Here's an important excerpt:

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns. 

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence. 

So let’s treat firearms rationally as the center of a public health crisis that claims one life every 20 minutes. The United States realistically isn’t going to ban guns, but we can take steps to reduce the carnage.

and then he goes on to make some concrete suggestions that has improved the situation in other countries:

Other countries offer a road map. In Australia in 1996, a mass killing of 35 people galvanized the nation’s conservative prime minister to ban certain rapid-fire long guns. The “national firearms agreement,” as it was known, led to the buyback of 650,000 guns and to tighter rules for licensing and safe storage of those remaining in public hands. 

The law did not end gun ownership in Australia. It reduced the number of firearms in private hands by one-fifth, and they were the kinds most likely to be used in mass shootings. 

In the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings — but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect. The murder rate with firearms has dropped by more than 40 percent, according to data compiled by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and the suicide rate with firearms has dropped by more than half. 

Or we can look north to Canada. It now requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them.

How much longer are people going to let the National Rifle Association prevent reasonable regulations on gun ownership that would help reduce the 30,000 Americans who are killed by these instruments of death every year? Come on, people! Let's talk about gun control.