The War on Drugs functioned as partisan voter suppression against Black voters

Evidence

But Reagan’s tough-on-crime Republicans had no intention of committing political suicide among their donors and redirecting the blame for violent crime from the lawbreakers onto Reaganomics. Nor were they willing to lose their seats by trying to create millions of new jobs in a War on Unemployment, which would certainly have reduced violent crime. Instead, turning the campaign for law and order into a War on Drugs enriched many political lives over the next two decades. It hauled millions of impoverished non-White, nonviolent drug users and dealers into prisons where they could not vote, and later paroled them without their voting rights. A significant number of close elections would have come out differently if felons had not been disenfranchised, including at least seven senatorial races between 1980 and 2000, as well as the presidential election of 2000. What an ingeniously cruel way to quietly snatch away the voting power of your political opponents. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1093

Categorization

• XREF: This is Kendi’s causal inversion in its purest political form: self-interested policy (drug war) precedes and produces the racist outcome (disenfranchisement). Connects to the reader’s core goal of mastering this inversion.
• SEED: An essay could trace how much of the modern voting-rights debate descends from felon disenfranchisement as a tool of partisan interest — the drug war as quiet voter suppression.