His latest single, “Spiritual”, brings police brutality into devastating focus, and now he’s offered his thoughts and voice to a stunning video that unpacks the War on Drugs and how it’s failed African Americans especially.
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Jay also talked about how the war on drugs has led to the rise of imprisoned minorities. He riffs off eye-opening facts about how mandatory minimum prison sentences disproportionally affect blacks and Latinos, and notes that racism folded into the way drug laws were written and enforced. According to the Times, African-Americans make up 13 percent of the US population, and 31 percent of those arrested for drug law violations, despite using and selling drugs at the same rate as whites. Today, meanwhile, marijuana legalization is promising to make venture capitalists with the right connections in the right places rich, even as poor low-level dealers continue to be sent to prison elsewhere.
“In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the war on drugs, which had been started by Richard Nixon in 1971”, narrates Jay Z in the video.
In a short animated 4 minute video, he cited that “45 years later, it’s time to rethink our policies and laws”.
Relevant to the short film’s claims is a 22-year-old interview in which top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman casually admitted that the War on Drugs was exclusively initiated to target black people and “the antiwar left”, published in Harper’s magazine in March. “Yea, more than them”, said Carter.
Jay Z points out how the government made a distinction between powder cocaine and crack cocaine even though the “only difference is how you take it”. In New York, where you can no longer be arrested for having marijuana, citations for possession in black and Latino neighborhoods are more common than they are in white ones.
In March 2016, Buzzfeed found that only 1 percent of legal marijuana entrepreneurs were black. “To this day, crack is still talked about as a black problem”.
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The multimedia project was initiated by Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and co-author of Jay-Z‘s book “Decoded”, the Times noted.
