From The Daily Dot, Aaron Sankin on what you need to read to understand Ferguson. Mike Brown had marijuana in his system — that changes nothing (and more). German Lopez on how there's no established connection between marijuana and violence. John McWhorter on why there is only one real way to prevent future Fergusons: End the War on Drugs. Nekima Levy-Pounds (St. Thomas): Going Up in Smoke: The Impacts of the Drug War on Young Black Men. Carl L. Hart on how the myth of the “Negro cocaine fiend” helped shape American drug policy. Anders Walker (SLU): The New Jim Crow? Recovering the Progressive Origins of Mass Incarceration. Armin Rick on the prison boom and black-white economic inequality. Christopher Ingraham on charting the shocking rise of racial disparity in our criminal justice system: By 2010, nearly a third of black male high school dropouts aged 25-29 were in prison or otherwise institutionalized. Half of young black men in U.S. have been arrested, a new report shows. Annie Lowrey and Jesse Singal on how there’s a shocking racial divide on crime and trusting the police. Tasneem Raja on 6 good reasons a black person might resist arrest: For black men in America, cooperating with the police isn't such a no-brainer. Wesley Morris on Let’s Be Cops, cop movies, and the shooting in Ferguson. It is time we treat police brutality as a national crisis: Jason Parham interviews Mychal Denzel Smith, Ruby-Beth Buitekant, and Darnell L. Moore. Bernard E. Harcourt, author of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age, on the exaggerated general perception in the public imagination and among police officers of an association between being African American and being a criminal. Evan McMorris-Santoro on how Ferguson is the beginning of the end for conservatives’ “war on crime”. Black people are not ignoring “black on black” crime: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the politics of changing the subject. Reparations for Ferguson: Ta-Nehisi Coates on how total police control over black bodies has echoes in American history. Redlining and reckoning in Ferguson: Given what’s happening now in Ferguson, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” demands to be revisited.
