As One Under the Law

P.J. O’Rourke

I first read P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious political screed Parliament of Whores in 1991, aged seventeen, and frequently didn't grasp what I was reading. Oh, I got O’Rourke’s unsubtle jabs at George H.W. Bush’s frequent ineloquence, his dismissive attitude toward bureaucracy, his open derision at how elected officials often mistake parliamentary log-rolling for work. But repeatedly, O’Rourke uses subtext I completely missed, often lacked the vocabulary to understand until years later.

O’Rourke’s chapter on American drug policy, for instance, features him joining a Washington, DC, police patrol on a narcotics sweep. The operation nets a camera-friendly arrest, O’Rourke writes, but the suspect was strictly nickel-and-dime. The arrest did nothing about the underlying condition. Frustrated, O’Rourke, an economic libertarian, questions a police officer whether cracking down on drugs has accomplished anything worthwhile. Would legalization maybe make better economic and strategic sense?

The policeman pointed to the crowd on the other side of the windshield [on a chilly DC midnight]. “We’re talking scum here,” he said. “Air should be illegal if they breathe it.” (115)

As a good Republican teenager and certified graduate of Nancy Reagan’s many in-school Just Say No campaigns, I completely misread that exchange. I assumed the officer meant that drug users, having dirtied themselves, subsequently dirtied everything they touched, and they needed removed from society before their pollution became widespread and intractable. On a conscious level, maybe that policeman even believed that, maybe. Humans can convince ourselves of anything.

But O’Rourke, an ex-hippie and antiwar activist before finding Jesus and the Republican Party in adulthood, probably meant something different. Given the time and place, “the crowd” milling aimlessly “on the other side of the windshield” was probably mainly or completely Black. O’Rourke, fearful of needlessly racializing things, probably took the “colorblind” approach beloved of White people everywhere, and omitted any mention of complexion, assuming his world-wise readers would know.

Michelle Alexander

The drugs O’Rourke’s ride-along buddies busted were mainly crack. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander has written, the crack “epidemic” and the Reagan Administration’s draconian response hit America just as the last dregs of manufacturing—one of the few employment fields available to Black men without diplomas—was leaving American cities. Many African Americans faced the social uncertainty of leaving home to pursue work, or the economic uncertainty of staying put.

Many Black Americans turned to crack, not because of any underlying moral failure (Nancy Reagan’s rhetoric notwithstanding), but because there was nothing else. But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 disproportionately targeted crack over powdered cocaine, despite crack being cheaper and less concentrated. As O’Rourke mentions elsewhere in his book, President Bush the Elder used his Oval Office pulpit to inveigh against crack’s evils in terms that were unambiguously racial.

When that unidentified policeman said “Air should be illegal if they breathe it,” he didn’t mean damaged people damaged the air. He meant The Other is inherently criminal, so anything The Other did should be automatically criminalized. I didn’t understand this until well into my thirties, and feel ashamed admitting that, but American justice presupposes that some people are inherently criminal, and passes laws to make this status enforceable.

Not only drugs, though. As Matt Taibbi writes, entire categories of law exist that White people mostly never know about. Anti-loitering laws, invented in New England to prevent Native Americans from lingering in White settlements, now get deployed mostly against Black and Brown Americans (and the occasional White trash), often on demonstrably specious grounds. Black Americans are way more likely to face rinky-dink traffic stops than honkies like me.

Matt Taibbi

Like millions of suburban White kids, I grew up never understanding these facts. I assumed, because that’s what 11th-grade American Civics taught me, that legislatures identified problems, like disorder and violence, and passed laws consummately. I was well into adulthood before I realized our laws create our definitions of crime and disorder. And our definitions inevitably serve to calcify our lopsided and frequently racist definitions of good and bad people.

O’Rourke, a libertarian Republican, tried to warn me thirty years ago. But because he used polite, White-friendly language, I missed the significance. And because I, individually, didn’t see the injustice being perpetrated, I made elaborate excuses why it didn’t exist, or anyway wasn’t important enough to care about. Only with the weight of years did I understand the unspoken suppositions underlying American justice. In the meantime, I became complicit.

That’s why, no matter how “not racist” anybody is, our opinions don’t matter. Because the law definitely is racist, and we’re under it.