Yes, competely agree on ending the war on drugs for the reasons you set forth.
There are numerous other measures I’d be in favor of that look race-neutral on the surface (and, as a result, don’t create racial blowback) but that would disproportionately benefit black people. These include things like:
- Universal healthcare
- Free, universal preschool starting at age 2
- Ending standardized testing for college admissions and relying instead on high school grades coupled with basic subject matter proficiency tests to insure basic competency
- Implementing affirmative action on the basis of income/assets instead of race
- Funding public education at a statewide, as opposed to a local, level to avoid big funding gaps between poor and rich communities
- Loans for higher education for deserving low-income students, with full loan forgiveness, provided they complete their studies and maintain a certain GPA
- Abandoning the creation of poverty- and dysfunction-concentrating housing projects and, instead, giving large tax subsidies to developers who devote 10% of housing developments over 10 units to affordable housing, so that poor and rich people of all races can be integrated throughout the country in a harmonious manner.
I haven’t described most of these ideas or their justifications in detail, but again, the underlying idea is to create total black-white/rich-poor integration in a fashion that doesn’t create racial blowback and then addressing any remaining racial prejudice (which I don’t expect much of after this kind of program is given some years to work) only afterwards. This is a marked contrast to our current approach, which largely ignores the material realties (especially black poverty) that give rise to anti-black racism as an epiphenomenon and focuses instead on browbeating (largely poor) white people about how racist they are despite there not being a shred of evidence that such an approach could possibly make anyone less racist.
