Elimination of "them" to save "us"

I often find myself trying to think of "legit" information to bring to the table in say a debate or discussion about a particular topic I know I care about and deserves to be argued, but that I just don't seem to have enough available information about at the time to make a strong argument. In other words, I'm a coward and afraid I'm going to get shut down by people on the "other side" of the argument so I resort to keeping my mouth shut. A particular part of The House I Live in spoke to that insecurity of mine. It seems as though, certainly when referring to the war on drugs, people are apologetic in that they claim that it's the simple "truth" that black people, as well as latino people, are involved more with drugs and get into more trouble with drugs than white people do. That's just "the truth", right? Look at the facts. Well what about the truth that these drugs were legal in the United States until powerful white people made them illegal in order to protect themselves. Making certain drugs associated with certain people illegal so they could arrest those people to get them out of the way and open up the job market for more whites. What about that truth. Why is that ignored? Why wasn't I tested on that history lesson? Why am I learning that after 22 years of being on this earth? Why do my 70 year old community members not know this? Who is with holding this information? Clearly it's swept under the rug by white people for white people.  That really hit me hard.

On a different note, I also can't stop thinking about how the police force "brotherhood" or "blue code" so closely resembles the same type of structure we see in street gangs. This was mentioned a few classes ago, and I never thought about it that way.  This resurfaced for me in The Wire when Quima, the token female police officer, is shot. It's as if the episode after she got shot had a whole new energy. Those guys were working non-stop, trying to find anything that might help lead them to the men responsible. They were on a manhunt.  Omar did something similar when Brandon was killed. He was working to get to Avon in any way he could, he even cooperated with the cops for it. He had a bigger agenda though, finding and killing Avon Barksdale. Seemingly everything I see in the police force is comparable in someway or another to the people they call scum. I wonder if any police officers recognize that.