Antiblack discrimination migrated from vagrancy laws into drug enforcement

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

• XREF: This is the mechanism-level formalization of the ‘saturated-system’ thesis—criminalization as reincarnation, which connects to Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and to the mass-incarceration strand of the reparations case. — connects to: Vagrancy laws effectively criminalized male unemployment and homelessness — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3285
• BMF: The ‘thumb on the scale for blackness’ metaphor evokes Parable of the Sower’s systemic, unmarked brutality — a structural cruelty laundered into legal neutrality — though the fit is thematic rather than a specific plot device.