@deepwatersolo
Goosefoot I very much doubt that the Black Community asked for generations of Black young men to be locked away for nonviolent offences. The very idea that some poor black community demanded something - anything - and politics followed suit is laughable. On that note: Does Flynt have clean water yet?
You might doubt it but I think you are phrasing it in a way that doesn't lend itself to understanding why certain things happened. There has been at least book by an academic on the topic of black communities asking for more policing and the institutional response to that. It doesn't seem to be historically controversial either, I've seen it referenced often enough, though not by the CRT crowd.
It did have outcomes that people now see as negative. Which is important and significant, and something to think about in light of calls to defund the police.
But just looking at incarceration rates and saying, this is bad and the cause is racism - it's not really that helpful. It makes a difference whether the mechanism for that is directly racist attitudes in the police, or correlations between race and poverty, or something else. It makes a difference if violent offences are committed at a higher rate by black men, looking to the police as a cause of that is not going to be in any way effective.
In my community there was an inquiry in the last few years into the question of police checks being more likely to be of members of the black community. (Basically randomly pulling people over.) Which was true, but the real correlation was neighbourhood, you wee more likely to be checked in a high crime area. I heard an interview with one community member, a black man and a social worker, who said he thought police checks were useful, but in order to avoid being racist they should do them at the same rate in other neighbourhoods with different demographic profiles.
Well, maybe, but then they are spending their funding and personnel on communities without much crime and presumably removing them from communities that are high crime, and where the residents regularly complain of lack of resources to deal with it.
All of this, consciously or unconsciously, seems to be very carefully avoiding the real questions which are why poverty has been persistent in the black community, which has been consistently difficult to solve, or in some cases even get a clear sense of the reasons for its persistence. It doesn't have easy solutions or slogans to attach to it, and it's an often frustrating and long-term effort.
I've felt increasingly like that work is being undermined, and talking about the difficult problems is less and less acceptable. So it is kind of a piss-off when people start saying "why won't you talk about this stuff?"