VOICES STATE SEN. DIANE WATSON : ‘Crack Is Just Jim Crow in a Pipe’

Since the mid-1960s, American blacks have been fighting not a legal war against segregation, nor an insurmountable economic war against discrimination, but a profound psychological war for our own sense of self-worth.

We are fighting to free ourselves of the psychological bondage to which Africans were subjected in this country. It is the damage that results when you distort a people’s belief in the cause-and-effect principle of the universe. It is the faith in this principle that motivates achievement and enables self-respect. It is the belief that effort produces results. It is the notion that “I can get what I want if I work hard enough, smart enough, long enough.” It is what teaches a human being to believe in productive labor. It is self-discipline.

When racism teaches a man that he must labor not for self-improvement, but because it is the unique doom of his race, that man will hate labor and loathe his race. When a woman comes to perceive that no matter how hard she works she can only marginally improve her lot in life, that woman will come to believe that effort is an evil. When children learn that their status in society will always be determined more by the color of their skin than by their achievements, such children will grow up convinced that achievement is futile. When a culture is ingrained with the concept that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between effort and reward, that culture will fit its people for survival at the lowest, meanest level of existence and fail to teach the value of self-discipline.

I submit that as you ponder how we shall win the war against crack, you will be deciding strategy to win what I dare hope is the final battle in the African American war against racism.

Crack is just Jim Crow in a pipe.

It is late in the day. Use well your time.