re: Dennis Prager on why poverty does NOT cause crime

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Even just in the late 80's, I'm sure you're aware of drug sentencing laws that were passed re crack which very clearly were done with the intent of incarcerating large numbers of blacks vs whites and their cocaine habits.

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I'm against the War on Drugs(tm) - the mental model used for crack was heroin, while the mental model for powder cocaine was upper middle class marijuana - having said that, there was a rational relationship to the violence associated with the activity.

Upper middle class doctors and lawyers (and Hollywood and music types, powder cocaine's universe) were not the risk for violence that, say, heroin trafficking and fights over drug turf. It was when large, wholesale distribution of cocaine that became associated with violence that at least the trafficking was targeted most severely by the federal authorities (i.e. Miami during the 1980s).

On the other hand, you have a point - cocaine is cocaine and the effect of treating crack like heroin resulted, particularly at the street dealer level and the megapossession ("with intent") in disparate treatment between powder cocaine users/dealers and crack user/dealers.

My counterpoint to that is that crystal meth is definitely following the crack model - despite a very high ratio of white dealers/users (although blacks have embraced the drug, to a certain degree, as a stimulant to replace crack, just as white stimulant users gravitated to crack during the latter decade of its heyday).

So, I believe it is more of a class targeting, with race as a reverse proxy in the case of cocaine (just my $0.02).

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That is an incredibly glib/facile way of stating it

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What I said was absolutely accurate and fair. I CAN'T go back in time - if I could, I'd be ruler of the Universe.

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Let's call it what it actually was: state-sponsored terror against an entire group of citizens.

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Meh. There was no genocide. There was no extermination. There wasn't even ethnic cleansing (although barriers were fairly well maintained) - it was an apartheid, legal, instutional, no question. It was barbaric. But the authorities tried actively to root out the terror elements and there was steady progress through much of the 20th Century towards Civil Rights reform.

Was it perfect? No. Am I proud of the way my country handled race relations during the entire period in question? No. Am I going to sit around and agonize about shite I didn't participate in and cannot change? No.

Do I want to talk about solutions going forward? Yes. Do you? I'm not certain. It seems that you and others want to dwell on festering wounds, pick at scabs and put off the healing process as long as possible on principle.

Hopefully, I'm wrong about that.