Obama’s Legacy and the New Jim Crow

“Progressives are challenged by the new Jim Crow,” opened Bryan W. Brickner, part of Publius, the pen name used for The Cannabis Papers: A citizen’s guide to cannabinoids (2011), “Obama included.”

On Thursday, President Obama commuted the draconian sentences of eight citizens in prison for non-violent drug crimes: six of the sentences were for life.

In a commutation statement, President Obama noted: “Commuting the sentences of these eight Americans is an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness.” He also said the extreme sentences where the product of an “unfair system.”

“This ‘unfair system’ Obama references,” Brickner added, “is Nixon’s 1970 Controlled Substances Act and its impact on citizenship. Sentencing reform doesn’t deal with our political reality: if this generation can’t clean up the drug war, we’re just leaving a mess for the next one.”

Michelle Alexander’s 2009 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, is highlighted in The Cannabis Papers; chapter 31, “Drugism/Racism,” focuses on Nixon’s drug war and the creation of a class of citizens – the felon – who face discrimination by our new Jim Crow.

“Once you’re labeled a felon,” Alexander wrote in 2009, “the old forms of discrimination – employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service – are suddenly legal.”

“Obama’s presidency is still before him,” offered Brickner. “The freeing of eight from an unfair system is a great step forward for eight – yet freeing a nation from Jim Crow could be Obama’s greatest step … and his legacy.”

Brickner has a 1997 political science doctorate from Purdue University and is the author of several political theory books, to include The Promise Keepers (1999), Article the first of the Bill of Rights (2006), and The Book of the Is: A book on bridges (2013).

The Cannabis Papers is available at online retailers and for free by download.