True to form, the Obama administration has already gone back to court to argue that the 6th Circuit was misguided in its directive to apply the Fair Sentencing Act. Ominously the White House is on track to appeal the 6th Circuit’s enforcement directive to the Supreme Court on technical grounds, which will likely rule that discriminatory impact is somehow NOT invidious and deliberate racial discrimination requiring any enforcement of any particular law. In other words, President Obama and Attorney General Holder, the most powerful pair of black officials in the country, are prepared keep tens of thousands of the prison state’s victims under hatches indefinitely. No matter their patter about how they were profiled back in the day. Their actions, not our expectations, and not their words, are who they are in the here and now.
Amazingly, all of this has played out over the last three years under and outside the watchful radar of the 70+ member House Progressive Caucus, the 42 member Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the entire so-called black press, MSNBC and the entire superstructure of corporate-funded advocacy organizations like the NAACP and the National Action Network and their affiliated churches. The black political class, from our preachers to our elected officials to our name brand organizations, are too busy protecting the president’s image and their own careers and funding prospects to bother with the actual opportunity of rolling back a little of the prison state.
They’d rather plan for their 50th anniversary March on Washington, at which the real Martin Luther King would be anything but welcome. And come next election, they’ll remind us to put on hoodies en masse in memory of Trayvon Martin, as we line up to vote. Our black political class have a keen sense of what’s important. It’s just not the prison state, not the fates of ordinary black people whom they nominally represent. It just ain’t us. Barack Obama and Eric Holder are the president and attorney general of the world’s foremost prison state, and they are determined to resist its shrinkage in every possible way.
Our black political class from preachers to presidents, bear close watching. Their hands, that is, not their mouths.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
Article Appeared @http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama-administration-seeks-keep-tens-thousands-imprisoned-under-unfair-crack-vs-powder-cocai