MSNBC host Chris Hayes responded Friday to New York Times columnist David Brooks' piece
on why he doesn't smoke pot anymore, delivering a powerful account of
how race and luck helped him escape arrest at one of the biggest events
in politics.
Hayes attended the 2000 Republican National Convention
in Philadelphia, but not without a little bit of trouble at the
security check-in. He inadvertently had a bag of weed in his luggage --
one that despite being caught by the police, came with little
consequence.
The MSNBC host predicted that in a best-case scenario, the cops
thought he was a senator's son -- an incident with "a whole bunch of
headaches" that they "did not need" on a night with greater security
concerns.
"I can tell you as sure as I am sitting here before you that if I was
a black kid with cornrows instead of a white kid with glasses, my ass
would've been in a squad car faster than you can say George W. Bush,"
Hayes remarked.
The end of Brooks' piece claimed that legalization of weed in Colorado
was "nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the
sort of person most of us want to be." Hayes jumped on that argument,
saying that "the one kind of person most people don't want to be is a
person caught in the criminal justice system," pointing to his personal
brush with the law.
A 2013 ACLU report
sheds light on the numbers behind Hayes' argument. Entitled "The War On
Marijuana In Black And White," figures show that even though blacks and
whites use weed at similar rates, black people are 3.73 times more
likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.
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