The Greene County Democrat

Tag: War on Drugs

  • Newswire : Administration tries to pretend slavery never happened

     Slave showing marks of whipping

    By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

    The Trump White House has declared war on history itself. In an official article published Friday, Aug. 22, on the White House website, the administration blasted the Smithsonian Institution for telling the truth about slavery, systemic racism, and inequality in America. It was not just an attack on museums—it was an attack on memory, on facts, and on the lives of generations of Black Americans who endured the country’s greatest crimes.

    The White House mocked exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and Culture for daring to explain that America privileges whiteness. It dismissed scholarship on the legacies of slavery in the Texas Revolution, ridiculed art that reckons with the Middle Passage, and condemned programs that document systemic exclusion in immigration and housing. It went further, painting the Smithsonian as “anti-American propaganda” for highlighting the ways colonization, racism, and oppression shaped the very foundations of the nation.
    What the administration is doing is clear: it is trying to erase the trail of oppression that runs like a scar through U.S. history—from the whip on enslaved backs, to Jim Crow segregation, to the discriminatory policies that persist today.

    From Slavery to Jim Crow

    Slavery was not just an economic system—it was a regime of terror. Families were ripped apart, women were violated, men were chained, and entire generations were forced into labor that built the wealth of this nation. When emancipation finally came, Reconstruction briefly promised equality. Black men held office, built schools, and claimed rights once denied. But white supremacy roared back with violence and legal restrictions. Reconstruction collapsed, and Jim Crow rose in its place. For nearly a century, Jim Crow laws ensured Black Americans could not vote freely, attend equal schools, or live without fear of lynching. The White House’s attempt to dismiss museums for teaching about this reality is nothing less than an attempt to silence that history.

    Red-lining and the War on Drugs

    When Jim Crow ended, systemic racism mutated. The federal government backed redlining policies that locked Black families out of home ownership, while white families accumulated wealth through suburban expansion. Gentrification decades later uprooted Black communities in cities, pushing families out of neighborhoods they had called home for generations. Then came the war on drugs. Entire communities were criminalized. Harsh sentencing laws and targeted policing filled prisons with Black and brown bodies, devastating families and stripping away economic and political power. The administration now attacking the Smithsonian is the same one that celebrates law-and-order policies that continue this cycle.

    Civil Rights Gains Under Siege

    The Civil Rights Movement forced America to confront its hypocrisy. Through marches, sit-ins, and court victories, Black Americans dismantled legal segregation. But every gain came with backlash. Today, voter suppression laws, redistricting schemes, and so-called “voter integrity measures” are dressed-up attempts to return to the days when Black voices were excluded. The Smithsonian’s exhibits on democracy document this truth. The White House calls it subversive.
    Erasing History to Protect Power

    The Trump White House’s attack on the Smithsonian is not accidental. By branding the truth as “anti-American,” the administration seeks to recast America as blameless. The logic is simple: if slavery is just a footnote, if Jim Crow was just the past, if systemic racism never existed, then there is nothing to fix. There is no reason for reparations, no reason for equity, no reason to confront police violence, mass incarceration, or economic injustice. The administration even ridiculed the National Museum of African Art’s exhibit inspired by Drexciya, a myth of children born underwater from enslaved women who died in the Middle Passage. Instead of honoring the resilience behind that vision, the White House dismissed it as “fringe”.

    The Fight for Memory

    The attempt to rewrite history is part of a wider campaign. This White House has moved to criminalize protest, weaken civil rights protections, and silence Black leaders. Attacking the Smithsonian is about controlling the narrative—deciding whose story matters and whose story gets erased.
    The truth is this: America’s history is not just one of freedom and triumph. It is also one of bondage, violence, exclusion, and systemic theft of opportunity. To erase that truth is to dishonor every enslaved man, every woman denied her humanity, every family displaced by redlining, every child funneled into mass incarceration.
    The Smithsonian was created to tell America’s story in full. Today, that mission is under direct assault from a White House that has chosen denial over truth. And if the nation accepts this whitewashing, the suffering of millions will not just be forgotten—it will be erased.

  • Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’ was government sanctioned terror on Black people

    war-on-drugs

    People protesting the War on Drugs

    Last week, a quote from Richard Nixon’s former Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman surfaced, confirming a disgusting truth that’s been well known by Black folks for several decades: the war on drugs had nothing to do eradicating a drug epidemic. Instead, it was a ploy to hide for the intentional targeting and decimating of the Black community. Ehrlichman states: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? 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. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
    I’ve always believed the “War on Drugs” was a hoax from the very beginning, thus I felt a wide range of emotions reading this quote. I’ve seen my own community ripped apart by enforcement of draconian drug laws. I know people who are currently serving sentences related to the same drug that, now increasingly legal, is being used to make white folks and the government wealthier.
    And still, America’s embarrassing incarceration rates and disparities, painstakingly outlined in Michelle Alexander’s now legendary book The New Jim Crow are merely a fragment of the aftermath of Nixon’s vicious war on black folks. When the highest levels of government, in the now incontrovertible spirit of genocide, decide to decimate a community, the ripple effects will be unending.
    Consider first: all wars need soldiers. The soldiers in Nixon’s phony war have been police officers, chiefs, prosecutors and judges- all law enforcement officials tasked with carrying out inherently racist order. Much of the now well-documented problem with how law enforcement officials interact with communities of color can be traced to the war on drugs. Despite the fact that drug use in our country has always spanned broadly across lines of race and class, our entire system and everyone in it were necessarily taught to view urban communities as being rife with criminals and addicts needing to be cleansed.
    None of this was  possible without Nixon perverting another broken system for his destruction campaign: mainstream news media. Plastering implicitly anti-black propaganda on major networks with regularity is how America was taught to view urban centers – and the black people living there – as deserving of war.  The war’s soldiers, therefore, are to be supported with a similar blind deference as we are taught to give our military. (A comparison which, of course, helps us justify equipping the police like they’re in combat).
    The kind of racist reporting Nixon expressly requested from mainstream media outlets didn’t end with Nixon’s shameful exit from the White House; four decades later, it remains a staple of what American’s consume daily. Just Google news anchor Wendy Bell and see what people who control the messages on your TV screens think of black people.  Hell, media bias is the reason this news of Nixon’s war against black communities (read: treason) wasn’t a front page headline.
    This is bigger than detestable police and biased media, however. Like with any unjust war, there are economic implications – in this case, in excess of a trillion dollars spent destroying the very community that ironically is one of very few domestic racial groups terrorized by the government that hasn’t received any sort of reparations. There are social implications, namely that what follows from unjustly incarcerating black people at alarming rates, a majority of them men, is a decapitation of the black family unit that spans generations.
    And there are lasting community implications, the most startling of which is that the blighted neighborhoods that are most impacted by the terror of the war on drugs – pillaged by Nixon’s soldiers and stripped of many of their bread winners – are part of the communities across the nation being actively identified “development.”  Gentrification is a brand of renovation that forces the removal of black families for economic reasons– and it didn’t appear out of thin air.
    So remember that the next “conspiracy” you hear being repeated by hundreds of thousands of marginalized people probably isn’t a conspiracy at all. The next time you hear that a useful social initiative is just too expensive, be reminded that we wasted more than $1 trillion over 40 years taking out Nixon’s perceived enemies.  And the next time people try to convince you that drug abuse in black communities is a criminal issue, tell them to extend the same courtesy given to white communities and call it what it is- a healthcare issue.
    Nixon wasn’t the first criminal to commit crimes against his own citizens; our government has perpetrated criminal atrocities against communities of color before, from the Tuskegee Experiment to Japanese Internment Camps.
    Lies and deceit are nothing new.  But this time, when you go to the polls, remember Nixon’s “War on Drugs.”  Then act accordingly.  The stakes are too high to let another lie go unchecked.