experiences with white supremacy).

And hence, the war on drugs.

In its initial incarnation, drug criminalization became a tool of systemic oppression to validate extremely racialized, xenophobic violence. They used opium-fear to promote anti-Chinese hostility, eventually leading to the Chinese Exclusion Act – which happened a few years before the dawn of the Great Depression. Note: This is yet another correlation between loss of white American dollars and the vilification of racially marginalized people.

It was police officers that worked to locate, arrest, and support the deportation of Chinese and other Asian peoples.

Also during the Great Depression, police officers from Texas to California began reporting on something called the Mexican Menace – also known as marijuana.

Supposedly, and to the surprise of every pothead who has ever existed, marijuana causes people togovernments, while relying on America’s pre-established and irrational terror of Black people and of non-dangerous drugs (like marijuana) to validate arresting an unprecedented amount of our people.

But further, politicians were also able to lie and blame economic woes on feeding and housing “drug addicted, Black criminals,” and victim-blame Black people who were murdered in the crossfire.

And FYI, marijuana, the same drug that validated so many arrests and murders of Black and Brown people (as in, 80% of the increase in drug-related arrests from the 1990s were due to marijuana possession), is now, literally, recognized as a medicine and prescribed in 23 states.

The War on Drugs was purely contrived to get more rich white people in office and more people of color in prison captivity.

And America’s white supremacist legacy