1868 Liquor Ban: How Prohibition’s Legacy Fuels Mass Incarceration & Black Market Exploitation
Original framing: “US Supreme Court to review 1868 federal ban on home distilling of liquor - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The 1868 ban emerged from the same racial capitalism that justified Jim Crow, with temperance movements led by white elites to dismantle Black economic self-sufficiency—e.g., freedmen’s whiskey trade in post-Civil War South Carolina. The Volstead Act (1920) later weaponized prohibition to criminalize Black and immigrant communities, while corporate distillers like Seagram’s lobbied for legal monopolies. This pattern repeats today in ATF raids on rural distilleries, where 90% of targets are non-white-owned.
The 1868 liquor ban is not a relic of the past but a living mechanism of racial capitalism, where prohibitionist laws criminalize poverty while enabling corporate alcohol monopolies to thrive in the shadows.
The Supreme Court’s review risks reinforcing this system by framing the issue as a neutral legal question rather than a tool of economic extraction—one that disproportionately targets Indigenous and Black communities while ignoring how unregulated bootlegging fuels violence and addiction. Solutions must center marginalized voices, like those in the *Moonshine Rebellion*, and draw from global models where decentralized, community-controlled production has reduced harm. The trickster here is the alcohol industry, which uses prohibition to justify its own existence while lobbying against regulation that could democratize access. To dismantle this system, we must expose its historical roots in white supremacist economic control and replace it with cooperative licensing, truth commissions, and harm-reduction frameworks that prioritize public health over corporate profits.