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: Governing Through Crime

Happy Birthday Martin

By Jonathan Simor

You cannot look at the devastation that governing through crime has brought to America, and especially to Black America, without wondering what Martin King might have done about it, had he lived.First start with the central fact that had King lived, he might have been able, even under President Richard Nixon (who after all embraced affirmative action as the black capitalist alternative), to negotiate the kind of federal follow up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would have substantially reduced America's ghetto poverty in the following decade. This tidal wave of progress might not have fully diverted the wave of criminal violence that was already unfolding in American cities in the 1960s, but it would have created an effective example of governing through opportunity and progress that might have bolstered activist government against the crushing pessimism that became the legacy of the 1970s and which made governing through crime a survival strategy for both conservative and liberal politicians in the 1980s...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on January 21, 2008 (boomark / email).