When we talk about huge, overarching issues in America or the world, there is often a dire need for change. After horrifying terrorist attacks like the Boston Marathon Bombing, all people from ordinary kids like you and me to politicians in DC find themselves asking “what can we do to stop this?” When school shootings never stop reoccurring across the United States, we collectively go on strike with regards to accepting the norms. Instead, there is a collective to fix some broken part of the system. In issues like this, there is always something agreeably wrong, a bad guy, a force that we can fight. However, when we talk about something drug reform, the discussion is not nearly as unidirectional because we have two major contrasting solutions. For a long time our country has maintained that fighting the war on drugs will be most beneficial, and so our policy has followed suit. But, as years have passed this approach has shifted in lines with atrocities across drug culture and prisons in the United States. Now our country as a whole is no longer seeing the large body of drug addicts in this country as the “bad guys.”
Michelle Alexander, possibly my favorite person on Earth, spoke at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference in 2017. This speech comes after nearly two decades as serving as a civil rights advocate with a special emphasis on exposing and challenging racial bias in the criminal justice system. She is arguably most famous for her book titled “The New Jim Crow.” And in her work she has come to some startling conclusions, suggesting that our nation’s criminal justice system functions “more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention.” Such a statement is startling for most Americans, and for myself certainly before I read her book. The logic behind the statement is as follows: our country supports both on an infrastructural and small level, policies that put more people of color in prison. Even when studies control for the type and severity of crimes, black people are drastically more vulnerable to being put behind bars. However, the caste system, or this idea of the “new jim crow” becomes incredibly more apparent when you look at the conditions in prisons. Prisoners are subjected to slavery-like conditions in which they are forced to undergo long days of manual labor where they are making next to zero money. Further, this money is heavily taxed, ensuring that prisoners work for a dehumanizingly, next to nothing income. This unpaid labor in combination with black people being inevitably more likely to be jail ensures a process that is far too reminiscent of our country’s never-ending history of taking advantage of black people.
The New Jim Crow
However, Michelle Alexander’s commentary is not driven by some fight against a certain group of people. The exigence of the situation does not derive itself in the same way that gun reform does. Instead Alexander exposes a duality to the exigence of the situation. There is some need to act now, to change what is currently ongoing in our country, however Alexander wants to modify this passion, to suggest another side to what is going on. When she talks about drug reform, a suggestion to our country to focus more on recovery and rehabilitation, rather than some sweeping approach to lock up all drug users, she suggests that racism be at the center of the reform. In some ways, she enlists those who feel passionate, but adds a second rhetorical device in the form something so near-to-heart such as racism, and throwing it into the discussion. She explains how race functions in this movement, articulating, “ If the overwhelming majority of the users and dealers of opioids today were Black rather than white, we wouldn’t have police chiefs competing with each other over whose department is showing more compassion to people struggling with drug addiction or drug abuse,” (Alexander). She asks us to be cognizant of how our country’s opinion on drugs is shifting with regards to race.
There is an immediately apparent commonplace employed in her speech. The speech takes place at an international drug reform conference. Those listening to her are passionate advocates interested in helping drug reform on some level. In leu of this, Michelle Alexander aims to translate their passion into a fight that acknowledges the role of racism. She takes their common shared idea, and enlists her own suggestion, her own modification in order to create a better path for change.
Michelle Alexander proposes a problem that the audience is aware of, capitalizing on their immediate passion. However, she also modifies this passion through shared ideas and experiences that help the audience to better understand how the ”New Jim Crow” functions in the war on drugs. Rhetorically speaking, she has all she needs, a shared desperation for change with and a clear history that she has “walked the talk.” That being said, her speech gains its backbone as she articulates how this discussion needs to change direction, absorb this new perspective, and continue on with the same passionate people involved.
You can find a link to her speech here.