The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? 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.

John Erlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon (via blood-and-vitriol)

In the late 50s/early 60s blacks were smeared as communists, in classic red baiting. In the late 60s/early 70s, as we see, it was the heroin association. By the late 70s/early 80s it was the welfare queen lies. In the 90s the heroin tactic came around again, but with crack. Then it became straight up “generations of jobless laziness.” There’s always some way of lying on the black community to tear us down and create stereotypes and misapprehensions of who we are in the white public. Republicans claim that it’s ridiculous that black people vote overwhelmingly for democrat candidates, but this is what they do to us.

(via theformerastronomer)