Transcripts
Transcript for Figure 1.11, The Myth of Race, Debunked in 3 Minutes
[Narrator]: You may think you know exactly what race you are, but how would you prove it if someone disagreed with you? The fact is, even though race drives a lot of social and political outcomes, race isn’t real.
One of the first people to attempt to categorize humans according to race was a German scientist [Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is pictured] in around 1776. He came up with five different groups according to physical appearance and the geographic origin of their ancestors. Americans of European descent eagerly bought into this type of thinking around the same time. Some historians have said the idea that there are different races helped them resolve the contradiction between a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery. If whites were their distinct category, then they could feel a lot better about denying freedom to people whom they labeled black and decided were fundamentally different.
But as political priorities change, definitions of race in America adjust right along with them. For example, if you were of Mexican birth or ancestry in the United States in 1929, you were considered white. Then, the 1930 Census changed that to non-white to limit immigration. Later, when the United States needed to increase its labor force during World War II, these people were switched back to white.
And what it took to be “black” once varied so wildly throughout the country—from one quarter, to one sixteenth, to the infamous “one drop” of African ancestry—that people could change races just by crossing state lines.
Then, suddenly, in 2000, the government decided that Americans could be more than one race and added a multiracial category to the U.S. Census. This has left many Americans scratching their heads when it comes to selecting who they are. As many as 6.2% of Census respondents selected “some other race” in the 2010 survey.
The idea that someone might look one way, and identify another way, or that they might be hard to place in a racial category, is not new. This is why there was a public debate about whether MSNBC’s Karen Finney could say she was black, or how we can’t even agree on the racial label assigned to the president of the United States.
Of course, many people feel their racial identity is very clear and very permanent, but the fact that some people have changed theirs, and that nobody can argue with them, shows how shaky the very idea of race is.
This is all because there isn’t a race chromosome in our DNA that people can point to. It simply doesn’t exist. When the medical community links race to health outcomes, it’s just using race as a substitute for other factors, such as where your ancestors came from, or the experiences of people who may have been put in the same racial group as you.
Dorothy Roberts explains that sickle-cell anemia is a prime example of this. The disease is linked to areas with high rates of malaria, which include some parts of Europe and Asia in addition to Africa. It’s not actually about race at all.
This, of course, does not mean that the concept of race isn’t hugely important in our lives. The racial categories to which we’re assigned can determine real-life experiences, they can drive political outcomes, and they can even make the difference between life and death. But understanding that racial categories are made up can give us an important perspective on where racism came from in the first place.
Attribution
The transcript for “The myth of race, debunked in 3 minutes” by Vox is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 2.8, Aamer Rahman (Fear of a Brown Planet) – Reverse Racism
[Aamer Rahman, speaking on stage]: A lot of people don’t like my comedy. A lot of white people don’t like my comedy. A lot of white people say this to me, “Hey, Aamer, hey. You get on stage, you make your jokes about white people, you say white people this, white people that. What if I did something like that, huh? What if I got on stage and I said, yeah, Black people are like this, Muslims are like that. You’d probably call me a racist, wouldn’t you?” And I say, “Yeah. Yeah, I would. Yeah, you should, you should never do that, that’s, that’s bad for your health.”
Like, “Well, you do that, Aamer, you do that. You get on stage, you make your jokes about white people. Don’t you think that’s a kind of racism? Don’t you think that’s—dun dun dun—Reverse Racism?”
So no, I don’t think that’s Reverse Racism. Not because—not because I think Reverse Racism doesn’t exist, right? If you ask some Black and Brown people, they’ll tell you flat out that there is no such thing as Reverse Racism. I don’t agree with that. I think there is such a thing as Reverse Racism and, uh, I could be—I could be a reverse racist if I wanted to. All I would need would be a time machine, right? And what I do is, I’d get in my time machine, I’d go back in time to before Europe colonized the world, right? And I’d convince the leaders of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America to invade and colonize Europe, right? Just occupy them, steal their land and resources, set up some kind of, like, I don’t know, trans-Asian slave trade where we exported white people to work on giant rice plantations in China.
Just ruin Europe throughout a couple of centuries so all their descendants would want to migrate out and live in the places where Black and Brown people come from, but of course, in that time, I’d make sure I set up systems that privilege Black and Brown people at every conceivable social, political, and economic opportunity. White people would never have any hope of real self-determination.
Just every couple of decades, make up some fake war as an excuse to go and bomb them back to the Stone Age and say it’s for their good, cuz their culture is inferior.
And just for kicks, subject white people to colored people’s standards of beauty. They end up hating the color of their skin, eyes, and hair.
If after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of that, I got on stage at a comedy show and said, “Hey, what’s the deal with white people? Why can’t they dance?”—that would be Reverse Racism.
Thank you, you’ve been great tonight.
[Applause.]
Attribution
Transcript for “Aamer Rahman (Fear of a Brown Planet) – Reverse Racism” by FEAR OF A BROWN PLANET is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 2.12, The racism of the US justice system in 10 charts
[On-screen text reads: Black and white Americans experience the criminal justice system very, very differently. For example:]
[Chart #1: Percent that feel police in their community treat Blacks less fairly than whites. Blacks – 70%. Whites – 37%. Pew Research Center.]
[Chart #2: One in four Black men between the ages of 18 and 34 report unfair treatment by police in the last month. 24%. Gallup, July 2013.]
[Chart #3: Blacks are more likely to report that police often stop people for no reason in their city. Black respondents – 54%. George Washington University.]
[Chart #4: And a higher percentage of Black and Latino traffic stops result in searches. White – 2.3%. Black – 6.3%. Latino – 6.6%. Searches as a % of stops, 2011, Bureau of Justice Statistics.]
[Chart #5: Marijuana use rates are similar. % reporting marijuana use in the past year. White and Black for the years 2001 through 2010. Bar charts show around or slightly above 10% for both, increasing each year, with similar percentages. NHSDA/ACLU.]
[Chart #6: Marijuana arrest rates are very different. Arrests per 100,000 people. White and Black for the years 2001 through 2010. Bar charts show white arrests at one-third to one-quarter of Black arrests. Black arrests start at 500 per 100,000 people and increase over the years shown. FBI/ACLU.]
[Chart #7: Suspects killed during arrests are disproportionately Black. U.S. Population – 13%. Arrests – 28%. Arrest-related homicides by police – 32%. FBI, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003–2009.]
[Chart #8: Federal sentences for Black males are 20% longer than whites, for the same crime. Shows calendar graphics with 20% more boxes, representing dates, for Black than for white. U.S. Sentencing Commission, data from Dec. 2007 to Sept. 2011.]
[Chart #9: The racial gap in incarceration has grown substantially since 1960. The first screen shows incarceration rates in 1960. Black – 1313. Hispanic – 601. White – 262. The second screen shows incarceration rates in 2010. Black – 4347. Hispanic – 1775. White – 678. Pew Research Center, Inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents.]
[Chart #10: Blacks and whites are roughly equal victims of homicide. Whites – 45.9%. Blacks – 50.6%. But murderers of Blacks are far less likely to be executed. Whites – 77%. Blacks – 15%. FBI/U.S. General Accounting Office.]
[On-screen text reads: A majority of Ferguson’s people are Black – 67%. But only a tiny portion of its police force – 6%. Unrest in Ferguson didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s one big drop in a very full bucket.]
Attribution
The transcript for “The racism of the US justice system in 10 charts” by Vox is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 3.5, Amy Cooper Made 2nd Call To 911 About Black Birdwatcher, Prosecutors Say | TODAY
[Stephanie Gosk, NBC News Reporter]: The District Attorney is calling her actions racist, criminal conduct.
[Amy Cooper, in recording]: Please stop. Sir, I’m asking you to stop.
[Christian Cooper, off camera]: Please don’t come close to me.
[Amy Cooper]: Sir –
[Reporter]: When this video of Amy Cooper calling 911 went viral in May…
[Amy Cooper, on phone to 911 dispatcher]: There is an African-American man in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.
[Reporter]: …it fueled already heightened racial tensions in the United States, and would end with Cooper losing her job and facing charges herself.
[Amy Cooper, on phone]: I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble. Please send the cops immediately.
[Reporter]: This morning, authorities say Cooper called 911 twice, the second time, falsely claiming she was assaulted—a detail disclosed for the first time in a Manhattan courtroom Wednesday, where Cooper was formally charged with one misdemeanor count of falsely reporting an incident.
[Christian Cooper]: You hear about birds, you….
[Reporter]: Christian Cooper, who recorded the video on his phone, said the confrontation began when he asked Ms. Cooper to put a leash on her dog in a bird-watching area of Central Park, where they are required. When she refused, he started to record her.
[Amy Cooper, on video]: I’m going to tell them an African-American man is threatening my life.
[Reporter]: Cooper describing the moment to NBC last spring.
[Christian Cooper]: I was like, wow, okay, you know, this is an attempt at racial intimidation, and I can capitulate to it and do what she says, or I can keep doing what I’m doing.
[Reporter]: Amy Cooper admitted there was no assault when police arrived on the scene, according to the prosecutor, who says she’s now negotiating a plea deal. Cooper also issued an apology after the incident.
[Amy Cooper, on the phone]: I sincerely and humbly apologize.
[Reporter]: Officials say her actions that day put Christian Cooper’s safety at risk. In a statement, the District Attorney said, in part, “Fortunately, no one was injured or killed in the police response to Ms. Cooper’s hoax.”
Christian Cooper is calling the case a distraction and said in a statement, he remains focused on fixing policing and addressing systemic racism.
[Hoda Kotb, TODAY host]: All right, Steph, you were talking about the fact that she’s actually facing a misdemeanor charge. What does that mean in terms of punishment? Are we talking jail time?
[Reporter]: Yeah, potentially, Hoda. It carries up to a year sentence in jail time. The prosecution says they don’t want her to serve jail time. Instead, they want her to attend an education program to better understand the implications of what she did.
Attribution
Transcript for “Amy Cooper Made 2nd Call To 911 About Black Birdwatcher, Prosecutors Say | TODAY” by TODAY is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 4.4, President Joe Biden to Raise Minimum Wage to $15 per Hour for Federal Contractors
[CNBC Anchor]: Breaking news this morning out of Washington right now, and it’s on the minimum wage. Maybe Eamon Javers will play peekaboo with some of that news for us. Eamon?
[Eamon Javers, reporter]: I will reveal the news for you, Andrew. This was under embargo until 6:00 a.m., but the White House is saying now that the president will be signing an executive order today to get to a minimum wage of $15 per hour for federal contractors. Remember, the president wanted to do this for everybody earlier in the year. They couldn’t get that done due to Senate rules on Capitol Hill, so this is sort of a drop-back position for the president. He wants federal contractors to make $15 per hour, according to the officials who briefed us yesterday on this. What they’re hoping to do is put this in federal contracts as of January of 2022, so that all federal contractors must be paid at least $15 per hour. They’re saying that that will be indexed to inflation every year, so it’ll automatically go up—they don’t have to do a new executive order every time. Biden officials say they are confident that it won’t kill jobs as a result of increasing this. I asked some Biden officials who were briefing us yesterday what their message was to taxpayers who presumably would be on the hook for the extra wages. They insisted, though, that there will not be any additional cost to this because they say all sorts of efficiencies and other benefits will come as a result of having that. So taxpayers, they say, will not be on the hook for additional costs here. But Joe Biden is expected to sign that executive order later today. Guys, back over to you.
[Anchor]: Just go back for a second. What do you mean by additional costs, additional efficiencies?
[Javers]: Additional efficiencies. So they’re saying that there’s going to be improved, all sorts of improved benefits in terms of federal contracting as a result of hiring these workers at a higher price point. And so, therefore, the overall hit to taxpayers, they say, will be a net zero. Right? That’s the argument.
[Shepard Smith]: Shepard Smith here. Thanks for watching CNBC on YouTube.
Attribution
Transcript for “President Joe Biden to raise minimum wage to $15 per hour for federal contractors” by CNBC Television is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 4.9, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: What Is Intersectional Feminism?
[Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw]: So, what is intersectional feminism and why is it important? Well, we’ve been talking about women and power against the backdrop of women’s political participation, and there’s so much excitement now that we have to really think about what we know about women and political participation historically. What are some of the lessons that we might learn from it?
Let’s think for a minute about the struggle for women’s political power right here in the United States. In about 15 to 20 years, we’re going to celebrate the centennial of women’s right to vote. Knowing as I do how we in America like to celebrate things as if anything that happened here was the greatest thing that ever happened in the world, I can imagine how excited everybody’s going to be. But here’s the question: Where do I, as an African American woman, get to celebrate my entry into the political community? In reality, I’ve got to wait another 40 years to celebrate because the situation was that giving Blacks the right to vote did not empower Black women, and giving women the right to vote did not empower women who were Black. So, this, quite simply, is what I call structural intersectionality: the collision of two overlapping dynamics of oppression.
Patriarchy reared its head during the debate over the Fifteenth Amendment. It was “the Negro’s hour,” they said, but the “Negro’s hour” apparently meant that it was not “Negro women’s hour”; it was “Negro men’s hour.” So what happened when the women’s hour came to vote some 30 years later? By that time, Blacks had been so thoroughly disenfranchised that Black women won nothing when women won the right to vote.
Now, you’re not going to read this story in our history books, and it certainly isn’t part of our political culture. We celebrate women’s enfranchisement and the women who led the struggle as though it’s an unabashed victory for women. The fact that a whole lot of women were left at the station falls from our consciousness, as does the racial strategy that the suffragettes followed to win the vote for women. One of the main arguments for women’s suffrage was that it would help shore up white supremacy. Women, it was argued, would be the helpmates to maintain the American way of life against lower-order citizens and all these immigrants. Adding millions of white women voters to the rolls would ensure that democracy would survive. It was not an accidental argument nor an isolated one.
Now, I don’t want this to be a one-sided critique because African American men weren’t any better on the question of whether Black women should get the right to vote. Their basic sense was that they were better off left disenfranchised. With friends like these, need I say more?
So, what’s the moral of this story? Why is this important? You might say, “Come on, this is ancient history. What does it have to do with contemporary politics?” Well, let’s ask a couple of questions. What might have happened had enfranchisement truly been universal? If women’s power wasn’t seen and celebrated as white women’s power? If enfranchising the slaves had not been seen as enfranchising the men? If feminism had been seen early on as incorporating all women, Black and immigrant, and Black and Asian? If anti-racism had been seen as incorporating all people of color, men as well as women? What might have happened, and where would our culture be now if the fight against patriarchy and the fight against white supremacy had not become alien to each other, and if the women who were subject to both had been centered rather than marginalized in these struggles? We can barely imagine how political life might be different in the here and now.
Attribution
Transcript for “Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: What Is Intersectional Feminism?” by Omega Institute for Holistic Studies is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 4.17, Adam Ruins Everything: Why the American Dream Is a Myth | truTV
[(Actor dressed as) Uncle Sam]: I don’t have time for this, Adam. It’s the Fourth of July, and my schedule is packed. [Eagle screeches.] I’ve got a car wash meet-and-greet, a mattress store photo-op, a hot dog eating contest… [gasps]. And I have to finish writing my big speech for the Americatown Independence Day Holiday Blowout Extravaganza!
[Adam Conover, host]: Oh, how exciting. [Chuckles.]
[Uncle Sam]: Everyone’s working hard to make it great, and no one wants you to ruin it.
Ah, you see them? They’re living the American Dream. Here, a little hard work can take anyone
from rags to riches.
[Young boy]: I was born with one leg and no money. But I worked hard. And now, I’m a billionaire! I could buy all the legs I could ever want.
[Adam]: Sorry, Unc, America hardly has the highest rates of upward social mobility. In a ranking of 24 countries, we came in 16th. [Sad trombone.]
[Uncle Sam]: How can that be?
[Adam]: The truth is, if you’re poor in America, no matter how hard you work, the deck is completely stacked against you. Being poor in this country is actually incredibly expensive. [Bicycle bell rings.]
If you’re living in poverty, you have to spend more on daily necessities, ’cause you can’t afford to buy in bulk. [Chuckles.]
[Woman dressed as princess]: Wow, now I can keep my butt clean in all my vacation homes. What a deal!
[Man in bicycle helmet]: You know, if I pull apart the double ply, it’s actually two for one. What a deal.
[Adam]: And if you have a lower income, you have to spend a larger portion of your budget on basic necessities. Up to 70% of a poor American’s income is spent on food, housing, and transportation. After they cover their basic expenses, on average, low-income Americans
Those who only make $15,000 to $20,000 a year are left with just one dollar a day.
[Man in bicycle helmet]: No, I shouldn’t splurge.
[Adam]: And that doesn’t just make it harder to get by day to day. It also makes it harder to save money so you can live more comfortably in the future.
[Uncle Sam]: Well, if people need money, why don’t they just apply for a credit card? Or get a loan—that’s how I paid for my last three wars.
[Adam]: Well, that’s a great idea. Except that to open a bank account or credit card, our financial institutions require that you already have money or good credit.
[Man in bicycle helmet]: Wait, so in order to build credit, I need a credit card, but I can’t get a credit card unless I have good credit?
[Adam]: And if you can’t save, even a small, unexpected expense can have disastrous consequences. Right now, 46% of Americans say they couldn’t afford to pay a surprise bill
for just $400.
[Man in bicycle helmet]: [Bicycle bell rings.] Oh my God, my bike! That’s how I get to work, and if I can’t get to work, then I can’t buy another bike. Curse this vicious cycle!
[Woman dressed as princess]: [Scoffs.] He seems lazy.
[Adam]: [Dog barking.] The fact is, poverty in America is almost impossible to escape without help.
No…Johnny Appleseed? What happened?
[Johnny Appleseed]: I went bankrupt due to my medical bills. Turns out an apple a day doesn’t keep the doctor away.
[Uncle Sam]: This isn’t right. These are Americans. They deserve the American Dream, not this nightmare.
[Adam]: Well, ironically, the reason they can’t achieve that dream is because we all believe in it too strongly. A survey found that 70% of Americans believe that poor people can make it out of poverty on their own.
[Woman dressed as princess]: Be the change you wanna see in your can, my friend.
[Adam]: Because we believe in this myth, we are far less willing to raise taxes or fund social programs than other wealthy nations. And as a result, we have far greater inequality. Right now, 43.1 million Americans live in poverty, while the richest three Americans have more wealth than the bottom 160 million combined.
[Uncle Sam]: [Gasps.] We have to fix this!
[Adam]: Oh, well, there are a lot of things that could help—affordable housing, free public college.
[Uncle Sam]: And I know we can do it because we have the best system of government ever devised, given to us by the Constitution, the most perfect founding document the world has ever seen. And we just so happen to have a copy in the Americatown Museum!
[Adam]: Oh, I love museums! But the Constitution is far from perfect.
[Uncle Sam]: What?! You can take that kind of talk to the filthy Commie Museum!
[Adam]: You have one of those, too?!
[Uncle Sam]: Grr!
Attribution
Transcript for “Adam Ruins Everything: Why the American Dream Is a Myth | truTV” by truTV is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 7.8, How Bush’s 1988 Campaign Ushered in a New Era of Racial Politics | NYT News
[Announcer in political ad #1]: Bush and Dukakis on crime.
[Narrator]: This ad, made by George H. W. Bush’s supporters for his 1988 presidential campaign, is infamous for stoking racial fears in an attack against his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis.
[Announcer in political ad #1]: He allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes—Dukakis on crime.
[Narrator]: The 30-second ad was aimed at painting Dukakis as weak on crime, and it used photos of Horton in a way that played into racist stereotypes linking crime and Black men. Critics say it encouraged race-based politics.
[Claire Jean Kim, Professor of Political Science at University of California, Irvine]: The insinuation is if you elect Gov. Dukakis as president, we’re going to have Black rapists running amok in the country, right? So it’s playing to white fears about Black crime.
[Narrator]: The Bush campaign denied any involvement in the ad, but later aired a related one.
[Announcer in political ad #2]: His revolving door prison policy gave weekend furloughs to first-degree murderers not eligible for parole.
[Narrator]: This ad directly attacked furlough programs, a common practice at the time where inmates were allowed out of prison to visit family. It was the same program that gave Horton his so-called weekend pass.
The effects of this political tactic by the Bush campaign lived on for years to come. When Bill Clinton took office, he took a similar tough-on-crime approach.
[President Bill Clinton]: The message today to the Bloods, the Crips, to every criminal gang preying on the innocent is clear. We mean to put you out of business.
[Narrator]: The Horton ad also gave way to racially charged politics that we continue to see today. A week before the 2018 midterm elections, President Trump’s team released this ad falsely connecting crime to Mexican immigrants.
Years later, the legacy of the Horton ad lives on.
Attribution
Transcript for “How Bush’s 1988 Campaign Ushered in a New Era of Racial Politics | NYT News” by The New York Times is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 7.11, America’s Guilty Plea Problem: Rodney Roberts
[Text on screen]: In 1996, Rodney Roberts was arrested for assault following a dispute with a friend. He was taken to a Newark, NJ police precinct where he was booked.
[Rodney Roberts]: So I gave my fingerprints and everything thinking that I was just going to be in, be out. All this was going to be a simple assault and I’m gone. So they held me maybe three, four days more and I’m like, “Why am I still here?” And they were saying, “Well, you’re being transferred to Essex County, to the county jail.” And I’m like: “For this?” And something was wrong from the beginning and they had already seemed to have sized me up already.
And I met the attorney that was assigned to the case. He was a public defender. I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “Well, you being charged with a kidnapping and sexual assault.”
Now at that point I went ballistic. I was like, “No, you got the wrong person. I’m here for this. I don’t know what’s, what’s going on. You got the wrong guy.” I was so caught off guard.
At that time of my life, I had just got a very good job at Quails Menswear. I was an excellent salesman, I was making very good money. So as a result — I was also in school – as a result I got an apartment in Montclair and brought my son there, enrolled him in school. I had made a decision that I was going to live my life, you know, as an adult doing the right thing.
They say it can happen to you and it happened to me. I mean, out of nowhere this comes. False allegations, I mean, falsely imprisoned. It happened so fast and so immediate.
[Text on screen]: Roberts was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl. The police said she had identified him in a photo array.
[Roberts]: When I finally got to the court, this attorney he came in and told me that the prosecutor’s office had a plea agreement for me. I’m like, “Plea agreement? I didn’t even do it, you know, I pled not guilty. I’m innocent.” There was this pressure. And he was like, “If you don’t take this deal, they’re only offering you two years. You’ll be home in two years. And, if not, you know, they’re going to take it off to trial and the judge is ready to give you a life sentence if you get found guilty. And I think you’re going to get found guilty.”
And this is my attorney telling me. This is the one person I had there to help me. I felt like I was by myself. Not even my lawyer – my lawyer was against me. And if I didn’t… I couldn’t go against the system. So I thought that, to get home to my son, to my family, and salvage my life, that the best thing I could do for myself was to plead guilty and fight it once I got home. At least I would be home in two years and I could fight it from there.
[Text on screen]: Rodney Roberts pleaded guilty to kidnapping upon the advice of his attorney. He was told he would only serve 28 months of a 7-year sentence.
There so much going to your mind, you know, you have to, you have to fight through the frustration of it. You have to fight through the depression that constantly wants to creep up over you. The feeling of hopelessness because no one believes in you. You have to fight against the inhumane environment that you’re in. But after 7 years, I was going to the parole classes, the pre-release classes, I thought that, you know, I’m going home. My family was waiting for me and lo and behold, the day I was scheduled to be released, which was June 1st, 2004, they call everybody else to leave but me. They told me, “Well, the Attorney General submitted a petition for you to be civilly committed.” I’m like, “What is that?”
[Text on screen]: Considered a ‘sexually violent predator,’ Rodney Roberts was committed to a treatment facility upon his release from prison as per New Jersey state law. Over 10 years, Roberts would appeal to have his DNA tested against the original rape kit. But prosecutors maintained that the rape kit has been lost.
[Roberts]: When they said they found it, when they turned to me, I knew that I was going to win. I knew I was coming home at some point because I knew I didn’t do it, I just needed the proof to show. So, they sent it to the state lab. The state lab in turn completed their report from 2005, the first DNA and this new DNA, and I was completely exonerated, 100 percent.
[Text on screen]: Rodney Roberts was finally exonerated and released in 2014. He had spent 17 years in custody for a crime he didn’t commit.
[Roberts]: Innocent people plead guilty not out of, not out of ignorance but out of fear. I mean you, you are afraid that you’re going to lose the one thing you want is your life. But that’s it. You feel like, “I cannot handle this lifetime, or doing this time for this crime I commit.” You say, “They’re not trying to let me go. And I cannot do this time for this crime I didn’t commit.”
And if it wasn’t for the DNA evidence, thank God, I most likely still be sitting in jail. If I didn’t have that, because eyewitness testimony wasn’t enough, so if I didn’t have that I would still be sitting in prison, trying to fight for my innocence and my release and prove that. So that was… that’s me.
Attribution
Transcript for “America’s Guilty Plea Problem: Rodney Roberts” by innocenceproject is included under fair use.
Transcript for Figure 9.12, What Is the Drug War? With Jay-Z and Molly Crabapple
[Shawn Carter (Jay-Z), narrator]: In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the War on Drugs that had been started by Richard Nixon in 1971. Drugs were bad; they fry your brain. And drug dealers were monsters, the sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing. No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets, the defunding of schools, and the loss of jobs in cities across America. Young men like me who hustled became the sole villains, and drug addicts lacked moral fortitude.
In the 1990s, incarceration rates in the United States blew up. Today, we imprison more people than any other country in the world. China, Russia, Iran, Cuba – all countries we consider autocratic and repressive. Yeah, more than them.
Judges’ hands were tied by “tough on crime” laws, and they were forced to hand out mandatory life sentences for simple possession and low-level drug sales. My home state of New York started this with the Rockefeller Laws. Then the Feds made distinctions between people who sold powder cocaine and crack cocaine, even though they were the same drug. The only difference is how you take it. And even though white people used and sold crack more than Black people, somehow it was Black people who went to prison. The media ignored actual data. To this day, crack is still talked about as a Black problem. The NYPD raided our Brooklyn neighborhoods while Manhattan bankers openly used coke with impunity.
The War on Drugs exploded the U.S. prison population, disproportionately locking away Black and Latinx individuals. Our prison population grew by more than 900%. When the War on Drugs began in 1971, our prison population was 200,000. Today, it is over 2 million.
Long after the crack era ended, we continued our War on Drugs. There were more than 1.5 million drug arrests in 2014. More than 80% were for possession only. Almost half were for marijuana.
People are finally talking about treating an addiction to harder drugs as a health crisis, but there’s no compassionate language about drug dealers. Unless, of course, we’re talking about places like Colorado, whose state economy got a huge boost from the above-ground marijuana industry. A few states south in Louisiana, they’re still handing out mandatory sentences to people who sell weed. Despite a booming and celebrated $50 billion legal marijuana industry,
Most states still disproportionately hand out mandatory sentences to Black and Latinx people with drug cases.
If you’re entrepreneurial and live in one of the many states that are passing legalized laws, you may still face barriers to participating in the above-ground economy. Venture capitalists migrate to these states to open multibillion-dollar operations, but former felons can’t open a dispensary. Lots of times, those felonies were drug charges, caught by poor people who sold drugs for a living, but are now prohibited from participating in one of the fastest-growing economies. Got it?
In states like New York, where possession of marijuana is no longer grounds for arrest, police issue possession citations in Black and Latinx neighborhoods at a far higher rate than in other neighborhoods. Kids in Crown Heights are constantly stopped and ticketed for trees. Kids at dorms in Columbia, where rates of marijuana use are equal to or worse than those in the hood,
are never targeted or ticketed. Rates of drug use are as high as they were when Nixon declared this so-called war in 1971.
Forty-five years later, it’s time to rethink our policies and laws. The War on Drugs is an epic fail.
Attribution
Transcript for “What Is the Drug War? With Jay-Z and Molly Crabapple” by Drug Policy Alliance is included under fair use.
