The Warehousing of Black People
Hip hop was very prevalent in black culture starting in the mid-1960s and connected with the “new Jim Crow” in many ways. In the mid-1980s crack entered the scene in NYC and it became more widespread once people learned how to cheaply make it in their own homes. Weed, which was already very prevalent in NYC black culture, was now being laced with weed leading to addicts. This is what the videos were mainly focusing on. They described the lifestyle of black people in the hood, producing massive amounts of crack to sell to white people in richer areas. With this sudden opportunity, they were able to make enough money to buy themselves better possessions, support their family, support their businesses, etc. While this was a great and somewhat easy job and gave many opportunities because of it, the government became aware of it. The government began to speak of the Crack epidemic and made police crackdown on the business. Thousands of black people that were selling weed or crack were being arrested for possession and selling, but not the thousands of white people that were buying and taking the drugs. This led to black people being incarcerated at alarming rates for selling drugs and being locked up for at least 5 years if not more. This is what Micelle Alexander talks about in “The New Jim Crow”, this. Mass incarceration of black people for little misconducts such as selling drugs is leading to the prison being predominately black population AKA warehousing.
In the videos, they focused on the rise of the drug business, its effect on the communities of NYC, and the percentage of Black and Hispanic people in prisons, most there for unnecessary reasons and for unnecessarily long prison sentences. Hip hop led to a rise in the drug crisis due to the fact that rappers would use the drug topic in their songs. This connected rappers to the drug crisis. Many of the rappers, including a very well know rapper still today, Snoop Dogg, sold drugs to be able to pay to get into recording studios and pay for the things they needed to make themselves successful. Because people thought drugs were cool, both to sell and to take, it because popular.
In conclusion, Hip Hop connects with the “New Jim Crow”, which Michelle Alexander believes is the “warehousing” of Blacks and brown bodies, is one-hundred percent correct and is still prevalent today. Many of the Black and Brown bodies in jail today are still there from the 1970s/1980s that were caught with drugs. The NYC prisons became a place for Black and Brown bodies to be kept and white people were still being disregarded for similar criminal activities that they did. This racism has been a thing since the beginning, with slavery, and people will always find a way to lessen people of color. This was one instance of a period of time in which race determined how you would live your life and if you could support your family and yourself or be locked up and unable to support not even yourself.
