Post-civil-rights ‘progress’ coincided with the war on drugs and mass incarceration

Evidence

In 1968, in response to these rebellions, President Johnson and, repeatedly, presidential candidate Richard Nixon called for “law and order.” During a post–civil rights period of supposed progress, American society also became obsessed with a destructive fear of Black criminality. The call for law and order gave way to the War on Drugs beginning in the 1970s, and to mass incarceration in the 1980s and ’90s. Meanwhile, police violence persisted and new forms of voter suppression became so sophisticated that they contributed to Republican presidential victories in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.11 In 2009, the first Black president came into office during the Great Recession, which produced the widest racial wealth gap between Black and white Americans since the government began recording such data. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1241

Categorization

• XREF: Causal chain (law-and-order politics to war on drugs to mass incarceration) is the sort of mechanism the reader wants to be able to restate in own words for the case study.
• QUESTION: The claim that voter suppression ‘contributed to’ Republican wins in FL 2000 and OH 2004 is one of the contested empirical claims worth tracing carefully.