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Playlist: Tim Ulmer's Portfolio

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A Bitter Harvest: California, Marijuana, and the New Jim Crow

From Chris Moore-Backman | Part of the Bringing Down the New Jim Crow series | 59:00

This documentary views Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" through the lens of California's marijuana industry.

Marijuana is the single largest agricultural commodity in California and it is the primary vehicle for the war on drugs' racialized arrest and incarceration system, which has our prisons bursting at the seams nationwide. Great numbers of predominantly white men and women grow, harvest, and process marijuana in California for distribution throughout the United States. Local law enforcement and the communities they represent - communities whose economies are marijuana-dependent - benefit from letting this part of the illegal process go mostly undetected, while the crackdown happens almost exclusively in poor inner-city neighborhoods of color.

Through interviews with Michelle Alexander, Stephen Gutwillig (Drug Policy Alliance), and Vincent Harding (renowned veteran of the African-American Freedom Movement), this program cracks open the question of why and how this discrepancy exists, and it explores some of its devastating consequences. It's a show that grapples head on with the reality of white privilege in the United States.

Bitter_harvest_image_from_truthout_small

A Bitter Harvest views Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" through the lens of California's marijuana industry.

Marijuana is the single largest agricultural commodity in California and it is the primary vehicle for the war on drugs' racialized arrest and incarceration system, which has our prisons bursting at the seams nationwide. Great numbers of predominantly white men and women grow, harvest, and process marijuana in California for distribution throughout the United States. Local law enforcement and the communities they represent - communities whose economies are marijuana-dependent - benefit from letting this part of the illegal process go mostly undetected, while the crackdown happens almost exclusively in poor inner-city neighborhoods of color.

Through interviews with Michelle Alexander, Stephen Gutwillig (Drug Policy Alliance), and Vincent Harding (renowned veteran of the African-American Freedom Movement), this program cracks open the question of why and how this discrepancy exists, and it explores some of its devastating consequences. It's a show that grapples head on with the reality of white privilege in the United States.