100 Years of Racist 🍃 Laws (Script & Sources)

This is a video about [bleep]. Oh yeah, we’re on TikTok, okay, this is a video about "leaf emoji".

Now, I’m not going to patronizingly explain to you what you already know, that leaf emoji laws were intentionally designed to create the foundation for a racist police state so they could imprison almost exclusively BIPOC and poor people based on zero evidence because cops could just say they “smelled it”, and “it” is a felony which, if you’re convicted of, you are reduced to a third-class citizen, who is systematically discriminated against by the state for the rest of your life, or simply imprisoned and forced into modern-day slavery that generates millions of dollars in profit for the exact same people and their children who created the foundation of this racist police state to begin with.

But we already know that!

So, now the government is going to take some steps to decriminalize and reschedule, and that’s going to fix this, right?

Not really. The thing is, America is really good at designing systems that make people they consider “undesirable” do all the dangerous groundwork, and then the second there’s a profit, shutting out those people, and taking every single penny. Slavery, the railroads, gentrified housing, migrant farming, literally all of modern social culture, and of course, leaf emoji.

The fact is, the change in leaf emoji laws, as of right now, almost entirely benefits rich white people, who were already not threatened by the existing laws, just now they get all the money, and I do mean almost literally ALL of it. And that’s on purpose.

So 80-90% of the legal leaf emoji businesses are owned by white people, despite the fact that white people and BIPOC consume at the same rates.

So how did white people capture the entire market?

Well, first of all, in most legalized states, if you have a leaf emoji related conviction, which is a felony, you can’t get a license to sell it. And just in 2018, after all the reforms, 84% of the people imprisoned for leaf emoji were still BIPOC.

It also costs a quarter of a million dollars to start a leaf emoji business, except because it’s still a felony, it’s legally impossible to get a business loan from a bank - which means that you need to already have a quarter million in your pocket, and hey did you know that 96% the the richest Americans are white, compared to 1.4%, who are black? Probably has a lot to do with the topic we’re talking about, not to mention literally of American history, up to and including right now.

So what’s actually happening is that after more than a century of imprisoning, disenfranchising, brutalizing, and bankrupting BIPOC communities for leaf emoji, America turned around and said actually, go ahead and make as much money as you want, unless of course, you were one of the people we imprisoned, disenfranchised, brutalized, and bankrupted, in which case, we’re actually going to keep doing it, because even today, in legal states, BIPOC are still more 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for possession. So if you’re white, the new laws are amazing news, and if you’re not, it’s a little better, but you’re still being screwed by a racist system. What else is new?