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Black History Month
O PINION
February 17, 2016
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Remember Black History All Year Long
J ill r iChArdson
As the rest of
the nation cele-
brates Black His-
tory Month this
February, I’m tak-
ing a graduate level
course I call “Dead
White Men.”
It’s actually a classic theo-
ry class that covers a number
of inluential thinkers, like free
market theorist Adam Smith and
the famous French observer of
American democracy, Alexis de
Tocqueville. It’s a good class. But
the thinkers we’re studying are all
dead white men.
In fact, they weren’t just white
and male. They were all members
of an elite that was rich and for-
mally educated.
There’s nothing inherently
wrong with that: They were all
great thinkers, and their contri-
butions to human knowledge are
indisputable. But their views of
the world were developed based
on their unique positions in so-
ciety. As a result, they had some
easy-to-recognize blind spots.
What’s missing in the canon
of classic literature taught in the
United States are the views of ev-
eryone else who built our nation:
African Americans, Native Amer-
icans, Latinos, Asian Americans,
by
and so on.
How would the theories
we use to understand our
economy, government, and
society differ if we’d re-
corded the thoughts of mar-
ginalized people along the
way?
For example, in The Wealth
of Nations — the seminal book
that deines capitalism — Adam
Smith asserts that the poor fac-
point, not experiencing it him-
self, Smith didn’t seem to think it
was that bad.
Smith goes on to describe how
individuals each act in their own
self-interest. Without any master-
mind in control, that lets the free
market work as though it were
steered by an “invisible hand.”
The role of government in aiding
the capitalist economy, according
to Smith, is minimal.
and sugar from colonies in the
Caribbean, nearly all of it pro-
duced by enslaved Africans and
their descendants. Not to men-
tion that the original inhabitants
of the New World that produced
this bounty were largely driven
off their land by colonial govern-
ments.
Some “invisible hand.”
That doesn’t necessarily nul-
lify the conclusions Smith made,
What’s missing in the canon of classic
literature taught in the United States
are the views of everyone else who built
our nation: African Americans, Native
Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans,
and so on.
tory workers living in England
during the Industrial Revolution
had better lives under capital-
ism than even a wealthy African
prince.
Those factory workers, how-
ever, were living in squalor, in
utter misery. From his vantage
Here, he misses the enormous
role of the British Empire.
During the Industrial Revo-
lution, Great Britain exported
wheat from its colony India even
during famines, causing millions
of Indians to starve to death. Cot-
ton came from the United States
but it shows a hole in his theory
that’s never accounted for. We
tend to accept Smith’s ideas as
they are, without noting this law
or analyzing how it might make
his ideas inaccurate in any way.
What if instead, the United
States elevated the perspectives
of the non-white peoples who
were marginalized, enslaved,
and exploited to the same pres-
tige enjoyed by white writers like
Smith? Wouldn’t we all better un-
derstand how the world works —
and how to make it work better?
To some extent, of course, this
is impossible. Many black and
Native American contemporaries
of Smith, or even poor whites,
were illiterate, and they’re now
long dead. But surely we can be-
gin to recognize and correct our
mistakes now.
Relegating black history to
just one month of the year — and
treating it as if it’s something sep-
arate from American history more
broadly — does a disservice to us
all. It reinforces the wronghead-
ed idea that we’re a white nation,
and that the history of other peo-
ple is only a part of our own inso-
much as it affects whites.
It’s great to have a month high-
lighting black history and the
achievements of African Ameri-
cans. But if any of us, regardless
of race, wish to fully understand
our own history as a people, then
black history must be included on
a level playing ield with white
history — all year long.
Jill Richardson is an author
and columnist for OtherWords.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.
Connecting the Dots in the Opioids Crisis
The role race
plays in the war
on drugs
k AssAndrA f rederique
Every year, hundreds
of thousands of family
and friends bury loved
ones because of the on-
going opioid overdose
crisis happening across
the Unites States— a
crisis that could have
been largely prevented. Research-
ers and health professionals link
today’s predicament to the ex-
plosion of opioid prescriptions in
the 1990s when there was an in-
creased prescription drug usage
of medications to treat pain like
OxyContin and from youth exper-
imentation.
Now, as awareness of this prob-
lem surfaces, prescription opioids
become harder to access, leading
addicts to turn to heroin, which
is often cheaper and more readily
available. But the origins of this
crisis began long before the 1990s.
by
It existed relatively unaddressed
within communities of color for
at least 20 years prior with little
response by way of government
support or resources.
Perhaps our biggest drug policy
reform failures stem from the his-
toric, unrelenting struc-
tural racism inherent
in the way our nation
responds to the drugs
crisis. Today, there are
national and statewide
taskforces with millions
of dollars allocated to
address and eradicate the “heroin
and opiate” epidemic ravaging the
middle and upper classes. Just last
week, President Obama proposed
$1.1 billion to combat the prob-
lem.
Blacks and Latinos stand by,
watching as public health ofi-
cials rush to bring an abundance
of resources in to help predomi-
nantly white communities, but we
haven’t forgotten how a similar
amount of money was allocated
to helping the police rush into our
neighborhoods— not to help those
of us dying from drug use— but to
arrest or remove unsightly black
“junkies” from the public streets.
The outpouring of sympathy we
are seeing for the loss of white
lives is and has been utterly absent
for the black and brown lives lost
due to drug overdoses.
If we had allotted a fraction of
the care and capital in the 1970s
tal overdose deaths passed vehic-
ular deaths. But why did it take so
long for this shift to happen? One
reason is that the people who were
dying of heroin, for the most part,
were perceived to be poor blacks
and Latinos. And this largely un-
addressed crisis is just more evi-
dence that in the U.S., black lives
rated by decades of public health
policies focused on reducing stig-
ma and promoting treatment over
punishment.
Structural and institutional rac-
ism uplifts whiteness and does so
at a steep cost to those who are
its intended targets. It is precisely
because black lives didn’t matter
It has sparked an increase in public
education and awareness, which started
after accidental overdose deaths passed
vehicular deaths.
to those in the Black and Lati-
no communities struggling with
addiction, we may not have the
opioid epidemic we do now. Nal-
oxone, the opioid overdose rever-
sal drug, is being offered over the
counter in pharmacies across the
country. It has sparked an increase
in public education and aware-
ness, which started after acciden-
do not matter.
If black lives mattered, our
government would not have toler-
ated a decades-long defeat in the
war against drugs. If black lives
mattered, Naloxone would have
been available in every urban,
health clinic starting in the 1970s.
If black lives mattered, today’s
overdose crisis would be amelio-
for decades that white upper mid-
dle class people are dying in stag-
gering numbers today. It’s time
to seriously take the call to honor
black lives because when our lives
matter, everyone beneits, includ-
ing whites.
Kassandra Frederique is the
New York state director for the
Drug Policy Alliance.