> Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work. > When there was a

> Poor whites are still more privileged via historicity of assets At the point you reach “poor”, the assets are gone, so this doesn’t work. > When there was an opioid crisis the nation responded with sympathy and urgency. When we had weed, we decided to have a war against drug users and send black and latino people to jail en masse, and there they sit still. The opioid epidemic was never solved, let alone “urgently”. I remember it emerging as a campaign issue in 2016. 2019 had a record high number of deaths by opioid overdose and it looks like things are going up as well. The US government reports that “fentanyl trafficking offenders have increased by 3,940.9% since fiscal year 2015.” ( https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficking https://www.ussc.gov/research/quick-facts/fentanyl-trafficki... ) so it doesn’t seem like they’re taking a hands-off enforcement approach either. To some degree there is a difference, but that’s because we already tried the War on Drugs and learned from our mistakes. > Does anyone remember the term "super-predator"? That's not an allusion to poor people in general, but rather a reference for black people. Like everything, it’s more complicated than that. Here’s Mother Jones on “superpredators”: ( https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-history-super-predators/ https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-hi... ). The term refers to a criminological observation that many violent juvenile criminals fit a specific type that is particularly dangerous and untreatable. It turns out that the cause for this was childhood lead exposure and that the super predator theory was out of date already by the time it was developed. It also turns out that childhood lead exposure disproportionately affected black children. The Clinton-era crime bills that led to mass incarceration also had a fair amount of support among black leaders. One reason for this was that crime was much higher in the early 90’s, and black people were disproportionately the victims of that crime. Cracking down on crime (including drugs) was seen as a benefit to the black community rather than a detriment. ( https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819/some-blacks-did-support-bill-clintons-crime-bill-heres-why https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/09/473648819... )