Do Better is an op-ed column by writer Lincoln Anthony Blades that debunks fallacies regarding the politics of race, culture, and society — because if we all knew better, we'd do better.

On Thursday, October 26, President Donald Trump delivered a detailed and empathetic speech announcing the White House's plan to address the nation's opioid-addiction crisis. Trump outlined specific proposals that were recommended by his commission on opioids, chaired by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, including a $81 million initiative from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense that will award grants to further research that will help veterans with daily pain management. Aside from declaring federal financing and resources to tackle this specific drug abuse problem, what made Trump's speech so interesting was how he — a self-described "law and order" president who has committed to a "tough on crime" approach — framed the nation's opioid problem as a public health emergency.

"As Americans, we cannot allow this to continue. It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction. Never been this way. We can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic. We can do it," he said. His plan to deal with the crisis has been seen by some as oversold and underperforming, essentially the creation of a modern-day "Just Say No" campaign.

After federal statistics revealed that 2015 was the single deadliest year in the opioid crisis, claiming more than 33,000 lives, on the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly echoed his desire to help these families. He personally connected the problem to the loss of his older brother, Fred, to alcoholism. He made that connection again on Thursday, and many noted the hypocrisy of the federal government's empathetic response to the opioid crisis, which disproportionately affects white people, versus how it responded (and continues to respond) to drug abuse in low-income black and brown communities. When the crack epidemic hit America in the 1980s, there was little talk from politicians about managing a "public health crisis," nor were the addicts and the victims of overdoses subject to humanizing stories about the ills of overcoming addiction. Instead, suffering in poor black and brown communities was met with zero tolerance and mass incarceration.

Heroin use by black people was used to start a war on drugs, while heroin use by white people has been used to transition that war into a more gentle, health-conscious approach, as noted in The New York Times in 2015, before Trump came to power. In the 1971, the phrase "war on drugs" was popularized by President Richard Nixon when he declared that "drug abuse" was America's public enemy number one and used the effort as a political tool to hurt African-Americans, according to his former domestic policy chief John Erhlichman in an interview last year with Harper's magazine. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," Ehrlichman said. "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities." By 1980, roughly 40,900 people were incarcerated for drug crimes.

By the time the crack epidemic hit in the 1980s, the vilification of poor minorities became so rife with panic that harsh policy quickly followed from President Ronald Reagan. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 allocated funds to build new prisons to house addicts and sellers but mainly just introduced mandatory-minimum sentencing that imposed incredibly tough sentences on crack users — who were mostly black.