So if you haven’t noticed recently, mainstream black commentators are in a bit of a huff about body cameras being put on police—the thing that they had been previously requesting. If you’ll recall, only a year or two ago Black Lives Matter and other groups were demanding that all police officers wear body cameras as a proactive way to stop police brutality before it happens—the idea being that a cop would be less likely to brutalize a suspect if they knew they were being watched by some benevolent third party.

Curiously, now all of a sudden Organized Blackness is against this. Why, you might ask? Because, apparently, the cams will “reinforce the police narrative” rather than the narrative that they want to push.

In layman’s, body cams present an objective reality that may or may not debunk the next “hands up don’t shoot” narrative. If this sudden about face surprises you… it really shouldn’t.

This is hardly the first time that Black America has collectively demanded some sort of law enforcement sea change, only to renege a few years later, shortly after they realize that this demand is, ironically, making them look worse than if they had pushed it under the rug.

It’s time once again to debunk another modern day mythology. This time, it’s a myth about race, rather than gender. And it’s undoubtedly another one you’ve heard before.

The myth I’m referring to is the idea of disparate impact in 80s anti-drug enforcement: the disparity between punishment of powder cocaine versus crack cocaine.

As SJWs are fond of whining, crack use is indeed punished harder than powder cocaine, and that does indeed disproportionately affect blacks more than it does whites. That much, I will admit, is not part of “the narrative”—it is indeed objectively true.

However, the narrative is being applied here, and what it doesn’t tell you is that this double standard in policing was demanded, and received.

What?

Allow me to introduce you to Charles Rangel, a Democratic senator from New York State. While he is perhaps best known today for being in favor of marijuana legalization, I can only assume that he made an about face after realizing how much damage his earlier policies caused.

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For back in the 80s, Senator Rangel was probably the hardest of the hardline drug warriors that fought the Reagan administration’s culture war. He was a major backer of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 that has more than anything else given the United States the embarrassingly high incarceration rate that it currently “enjoys” (and which flogging might alleviate as I argued here, and another writer has argued here).

More specifically related to the thesis of this article, the 1986 act described above is specifically the law that created the disparate sentencing for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.

Let me point out the high-larious irony of this: the laws that allegedly destroyed the black family and black America on the whole were sponsored… by a black man.

Also worth pointing out is that the 1986 anti-drug law can arguably be considered part of a larger trend within mid 20th century African-American politics. When perusing documentation from the time you can see a major complaint is that the police allegedly ignored black neighborhoods and communities, which naturally engendered an environment where criminals plied their criminal trade without fear of punishment. Indeed, you will find instances where African-Americans demanded that the police pay more attention to their community!

The train of thought from general police attention, to demanding harsher sentences for crack use, to demanding that the police use body cams… it all seems broadly similar, doesn’t it? Always demanding more stringency from society’s watchmen.

Unfortunately, these measures always seem to have roughly the same effect—namely that blacks started getting arrested at much higher rates than white people. And it seems that inevitably they wanted to put the metaphorical genie back into its bottle, and that brings us to today. Even with the “crack wars” long behind us, we still see this pattern of demanding that the police do something, and then retreading those demands once you realize that, like clockwork, it allegedly ends up making black America look bad.

What To Do?

So, apparently we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. And, of course, I have no desire of treading down this path for the rest of time—and several other Return of Kings writers have expressed similar sentiments. So either Black America has to take the metaphorical ball into its own court and admit that they have some problems that don’t originate in police mistreatment and the evils of “wypipo,” or we can continue rehauling society over and over and over again until the problem goes away, and black people can finally be on par with white people.

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