Anti-black economic harms went unprosecuted while criminality was reincarnated in new statutes
Evidence
While most of the discrimination against black Americans that we have read about in this chapter would seem to constitute crimes, it was usually not considered in that light. Even instances that were overt crimes were never prosecuted. The law’s judgment of who is a criminal has always had a thumb on the scale for blackness. And while “widespread convict leasing” may have ended during World War II, criminalizing black people did not. Instead of vagrancy statutes, it was reincarnated in “tough on crime” drug laws. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 409
Categorization
- QUESTION: The claim that harmful discrimination was never prosecuted invites the question: what would prosecution have even looked like — and is Brown implying a legal-duty argument the state breached?
- XREF: connects to: Economic crisis birthed twin racial projects criminalizing blacks and Arabs — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 237; Post-Reconstruction white supremacy nearly eliminated black lawyers from the bar — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3666; Post-emancipation Black Codes criminalized work refusal and reestablished forced labor — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 384 (+9 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Economic crisis birthed twin racial projects criminalizing blacks and Arabs — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 237; Post-Reconstruction white supremacy nearly eliminated black lawyers from the bar — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3666; Post-emancipation Black Codes criminalized work refusal and reestablished forced labor — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 384 (+9 more)
Broader Connections
- Ending slavery merely shifted racial control from slave law to criminal law
#corroborates(0.93) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 847