From “Dropout to Doctorate: Breaking the Chains of Educational Injustice” By Terrence Lester, PhD
These inherently vicious cycles were exacerbated in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, when social stigma against Black people seemed to escalate dramatically. This was due in part to the War on Drugs and the crack epidemic, with its systemic mass incarceration and racial disparities and injustices. Instigated by the Nixon administration, the War on Drugs saw the numbers of incarcerated rise from three hundred thousand to over two million people. Of those two million, two-thirds were people of color. This is important because, post-Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, racial discrimination increased through public policy and rhetoric that framed Black people, already suffering from poverty, as criminals. John Ehrilichmans, a Nixon aide and Watergate co-conspirator, confirmed that the War on Drugs was aimed at disrupting Black communities. Dan Baum interviewed Ehrilichman and captured his words about how this policy was intentionally designed:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people… 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.”