Unpacking “Chiraq” #2: Repression, RICO, and War on Terror Tactics
by nancy a heitzeg

What does it mean to call a city a War Zone? To write entire Black and Brown neighborhoods – and all their inhabitants – out of the United States of America and into a script that so effectively “others” them that they are now a foreign enemy state? What does it mean for public perception? What does it mean for police state response?

While the term “Chiraq” may have one set of meanings for those who survive Chicago’s high gun violence rate (see Unpacking ‘Chiraq’ #1: Chief Keef, Badges of Honor, and Capitalism), it serves to legitimate, without question, already solidified stereotypes of youth of color. “Chiraq” also links, per usual this violence to gangs. “Chiraq” implies that the already draconian domestic police approach to gangs is insufficient, and that a military response is now needed.

What other message could one take from the recent edition of HBO’s Vice Episode #9 Chiraq ? Where segments of a major US city are described like this — “The South Side of Chicago is basically a failed state within the borders of the U.S.”? Where viewers are blithely taken from Chicago’s Southside to then “hunting oil pirates in Nigeria”?

The lethal combination of gangs and guns has turned Chicago into a war zone. To see why the Windy City, now dubbed “Chiraq,” had the country’s highest homicide rate in 2012, VICE visits Chicago’s most dangerous areas, where handguns are plentiful and the police and community leaders are fighting a losing battle against gang violence. In the neighborhood of Englewood, we patrol with police, visit with religious leaders, and hang out with members of gangs – soldiers in a turf war that has spread into new communities as projects are destroyed and residents are forced to move elsewhere.

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I came of age in New York City during the height of the crack cocaine era. I don’t think that young people living in the city today can fully comprehend what this was like. One thing to say is that the media was guilty of reporting countless sensational stories about crime and violence during that time. Many of these stories included a myriad references to “crack babies.” Turns out that there was no actual epidemic of “crack babies.” It served as another excuse to wage war on black women and our bodies in particular…

The New York Times reported recently on the “epidemic that was not:”

This week’s Retro Report video on “crack babies” (infants born to addicted mothers) lays out how limited scientific studies in the 1980s led to predictions that a generation of children would be damaged for life. Those predictions turned out to be wrong. This supposed epidemic — one television reporter talks of a 500 percent increase in damaged babies — was kicked off by a study of just 23 infants that the lead researcher now says was blown out of proportion. And the shocking symptoms — like tremors and low birth weight — are not particular to cocaine-exposed babies, pediatric researchers say; they can be seen in many premature newborns.

The worrisome extrapolations made by researchers — including the one who first published disturbing findings about prenatal cocaine use — were only part of the problem. Major newspapers and magazines, including Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times, ran articles and columns that went beyond the research. Network TV stars of that era, including Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, also bear responsibility for broadcasting uncritical reports.

Included in their report is a very well done video. You can watch it here.

The New York Times reports on a new ACLU study about marijuana use and enforcement:

Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data.

The Times story includes the following map which illustrates the disparities in marijuana arrests.

Please read the entire interactive ACLU report HERE.

David Simon speaks some truth:

The occasion was staged by the Observer and chaired by its editor, John Mulholland, as part of its campaign to address the global drugs crisis.

Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on – and the curse of – drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore’s case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.

The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, “excess Americans”: once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs “a holocaust in slow motion”.

Simon said he “begins with the assumption that drugs are bad”, but also that the war on drugs has “always proceeded along racial lines”, since the banning of opium.

It is waged “not against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans,” he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: “We do not need 10-12% of our population; they’ve been abandoned. They don’t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.”

As a result, “drugs are the only industry left in places such as Baltimore and east St Louis” – an industry that employs “children, old people, people who’ve been shooting drugs for 20 years, it doesn’t matter. It’s the only factory that’s still open. The doors are open.”

Only a rich white man can make such statements and still be taken half-seriously by some elites. As such, I hope that he keeps speaking publicly…

In today’s edition about the racist and failed “war on drugs,” I wanted to share this commentary and report by Melissa Harris-Perry who asks if this is the beginning of the end for this so-called war.

The word “war” is often utilized to push people into fighting for a collective goal or against a common enemy. There are classic military conflicts like the Civil War and World War II, and there are the ideological fights like the “War on Poverty” launched by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

But what happens when a war is waged against a faceless and intangible enemy? Host Melissa Harris-Perry asked her Sunday panel whether it is time to re-focus and rename the “War on Drugs.” As Eugene Jarecki, director of the documentary The House I Live In, put it, “It hasn’t achieved anything. It’s achieved catastrophe.”

In the 42 years since President Nixon launched the “War on Drugs” in 1971, the consequences have outweighed the gains. According to the ACLU, of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, 25% of them imprisoned for drug offenses. There’s a reason why these incarceration rates are so high, according to Kathleen Frydl, author of The Drug Wars in America, 1940-1973. “Our incarceration rates reflect the artifacts of our enforcement strategies,” said Frydl on the show.

There is an ethnic divide when it comes to drug arrests. Thirty-eight percent of those arrested for drug offenses are African-Americans, and they spend almost as much time in prison for those drug offenses as white criminals do for violent offenses.

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From the Huffington Post:

More than half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes in 2010,according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and that number has only just dipped below 50 percent in 2011. Despite more relaxed attitudes among the public at large toward non-violent offenses like marijuana use, the number of people in federal prison for drug offenses spiked from 74,276 in 2000 to 97,472 in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones — even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.

by Emory Douglas

The Gregory Brothers strike again with this very good music video documenting the fact that the war on drugs is a failure.

The Huffington Post did a good job yesterday reporting on the costs of the so-called “war on drugs:”

Despite an increased emphasis on treatment and prevention programs in recent years, the Obama administration in its 2013 budget still requested $25.6 billion in federal spending on the drug war. Of that, $15 billion would go to law enforcement, interdiction and international efforts.

The pro-reform Drug Policy Alliance estimates that when you combine state and local spending on everything from drug-related arrests to prison, the total cost adds up to at least $51 billion per year. Over four decades, the group says, American taxpayers have dished out $1 trillion on the drug war.

From Sociological Cinema:

“This short news documentary examines the relationships between race, poverty, incarceration, crime, and the war on drugs. It focuses on Baltimore, and its very high crime rates, showing how poor residents get attracted to crime and the drug business as a means of economic survival…

Read the accompanying story here.

Below is a shorter news clip from 2008: