White Addiction: Racial Ineqaulity, Racial Ideology, and the War on Drugs
![handle is hein.journals/tempcr10 and id is 449 raw text is: WHITE ADDICTION: RACIAL INEQUALITY, RACIAL
IDEOLOGY, AND THE WAR ON DRUGS
by BENJAMIN D. STEINER* & VICTOR ARGOTHY*
[Q]pposing whiteness is not the same as opposing white people.
White supremacy is an equal opportunity employer; nonwhite people
can become active agents of white supremacy as well as passive par-
ticipants in its hierarchies and rewards.'
Some of these kids come from beautiful homes, says W.J. Hunt,
chairman of the Los Angeles County Narcotics and Dangerous Drug
Commission. While their parents are at some cocktail party, the
kids drink, gulp down pills, and away they go toward marijuana and
heroin.2
PROLOGUE: A RACED WAR
America's contemporary War on Drugs is a government-sponsored in-
surgency targeted against historically and contemporarily underprivileged
Americans in general, and African and Latino/a Americans in particular.
Masquerading as an expanded, nationwide criminal justice enforcement pro-
gram of controlled and/or illegal substances, it is a selective widening of the
law's net into our nation's impoverished and disenfranchised urban commu-
nities. In short, the drug war is just say no to drugs by just say yes to se-
lective targeting of African Americans and Latino/a Americans by law en-
forcement officials and the courts. It is a series of policies, we, as the other
contributors to this symposium, submit, puts in danger both civil and human
rights-fundamental tenets of a democratic society.
Acquiescing to these racially and ethnically targeted policies is a form of
bystander or passive racial apathy on the part of the American majority. In
such a racially divisive climate America's color line is, in a word, reinforced.
While more and more African Americans and Latino/a Americans targeted
in impoverished-open-air drug markets go to prison, the nation's drug prob-
lem becomes a crime crisis in underprivileged communities of color at the
same time that it becomes less of a crime in the predominantly white sub-
. Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware. I wish to
thank Sheila Gill, Anne Bowler, Ruth Fleury, and Austin Sarat for extremely helpful suggestions on
earlier drafts of this paper.
Ph.D. student in Sociology, University of Delaware.
1. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment In Whiteness: How White People Profit From Iden-
tity Politics, (Temple U. Press 1998).
2. Ponchita Pierce, Crime in the Suburbs, in The White Problem in America 119 (Ebony Eds.,
Johnson Pub. Co. 1966).
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White Addiction: Racial Ineqaulity, Racial Ideology, and the War on Drugs
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