Jena, O. J. and the Jailing of Black America

I am embarrassed to be a human being when such a blatantly racist and horrific diatribe gets posted in the New York Times. Give me a break! the following paragraph starts out good, as Patterson briefly acknowledges the role that the drug war has played in incarcerating black Americans.

America has more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate.

The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African-Americans in their 30s now has a prison record, as do nearly two-thirds of all black male high school dropouts. These numbers and rates are incomparably greater than anything achieved at the height of the Jim Crow era. What’s odd is how long it has taken the African-American community to address in a forceful and thoughtful way this racially biased and utterly counterproductive situation.

Those of us that are in the drug policy reform committee have been complaining about the impact of the uneven application of the drug laws for years. America's incarceration rate is shockingly high and this issue is not being addressed. Black, poor communities are often targeted for drug raids while what people do behind closed doors in their white, upper, middle-class suburban homes gets ignored. It's ridiculous to think that anybody in any community should be persecuted for smoking the wrong plant. But from this point on, the article descends into race-baiting.

But there is another equally important cause: the simple fact that young black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes, especially violent crimes, which cannot be attributed to judicial bias, racism or economic hardships. The rate at which blacks commit homicides is seven times that of whites.

The rest of the article can be summed up like this:

Rappers
OJ
Divorce
Domestic violence
Bitches and hoes

But it's not because of racism and poverty.

Rappers sell racist and sexist crap because white people buy it. Domestic violence against women is a global epidemic. Black men live in a patriarchy and have internalized the hate as much as anybody else.

Anyway, I haven't got the perfect rebuttal to this except %$&#*^)#%#. Also, Patterson can suck it.