Is white rage driving our racial divide?
The GOP, “trapped between a demographically declining support base and an ideological straitjacket . . . reached for a tried and true weapon: disfranchisement.” Anderson notes that despite the rarity of voter fraud, state after state began requiring voters to have documents such as bank statements, utility bills and W-2 forms, which African Americans, Latinos, the young and other economically disadvantaged people are less likely than others to possess.
.. “At this point,” Anderson writes, “Reagan chose to slash the training, employment and labor services budget by 70 percent — a cut of $3.805 billion.”
Among the programs targeted were those that assisted college-bound African Americans, causing their college enrollment to tumble from 34 to 26 percent. “Thus, just at the moment when the post-industrial economy made an undergraduate degree more important than ever, 15,000 fewer African Americans were in college during the early 1980s than had been the case in the mid 1970s,” Anderson writes... And as crack ravaged black communities, Anderson argues, the Reagan administration targeted the victims, rather than the drug-smuggling villains... The war on drugs, Anderson says, “replaced the explicit use of race as the mechanism to deny black Americans their rights as citizens.”.. And while African Americans are the least likely to use or sell drugs, Anderson writes, “law enforcement has continued to focus its efforts on the black population.” As a result, she writes, blacks, while 13 percent of the national population, make up 45 percent of those incarcerated... Less persuasive is her contention that rage, rather than a cool and calculated effort to retain economic and social primacy, is behind the destructive policies she cites.