"The hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made the roundup easy. Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the black poor are convenient targets. ... The enduring racial isolation of the ghetto poor has made them uniquely vulnerable in the War on Drugs. What happens to them does not directly affect—and is scarcely noticed by—the privileged beyond the ghetto’s invisible walls. Thus it is here, in the poverty-stricken, racially segregated ghettos, where the War on Poverty has been abandoned and factories have disappeared, that the drug war has been waged with the greatest ferocity. SWAT teams are deployed here; buy-and-bust operations are concentrated here; drug raids of apartment buildings occur here; stop-and-frisk operations occur on the streets here. Black and brown youth are the primary targets.[emphasis added -RMF]" -Michelle Alexander "The New Jim Crow"
Is Whatcom county a racist county in a racist state? I won't pretend to have the complete answer in this post. I do know that something Bellingham and Lynden (two of Whatcom County's biggest cities) have in common, is that you can often spend the whole day downtown in either without ever noticing a person of color! And that makes it somehow very different from where my wife and I grew up in Oakland, CA. This post will examine the county jails of WA and question whether or not racial bias is a part of Whatcom County and Washington's law and justice system. Below is a table of WA state jails and their counts of Total Population, Average Daily Jail Populations of 'People of Color' (not white) and the all white populations of those 39 WA counties. City and regional jail data is appended with no additional population data.
