adminMatt Peppe Correspondent
Over the last few years the killing of unarmed African Americans including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray by agents of the state have generated massive protests against a political system that almost never punishes police violence. Activist groups like Black Lives Matter have emerged as voices on the front lines from Ferguson to Baltimore.
Their message is simple: American society and the political system it has created do not value black lives the same as white lives. They draw powerful connections between the state-sanctioned use of force, a discriminatory criminal justice system, mass incarceration, and economic inequality for racial minorities. But their indictment of the system is predictably met with hostility by conservatives in denial that white supremacy exists, much less dominates American politics.
Right-wing authoritarians believe the real problem is liberals blowing a small number of sensationalist incidents out of proportion. They claim liberals take isolated cases of blacks being killed during police encounters and misconstrue them as discrimination, or liberals argue that unemployed or incarcerated blacks created their own fate through their personal choices.
Most conservatives cling defensively to the notion that the system is fair, and people who claim otherwise are guilty of selection bias. They see authorities as noble and worthy of respect. Any evidence to the contrary can be written off as a few cases of bad apples.
In reality, there is overwhelming empirical evidence that white supremacy plays a dominant role in American society. Mark Twain had a point when he said, “there’s three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Taken individually, you could cherry-pick any piece of data to make a point. But when you analyse the picture holistically, the result is an unequivocal pattern.
Multiple indicators — police shootings, incarceration rates, public health indicators, wealth indeces and drug use rates — demonstrate that African Americans are disadvantaged in the United States. And not just disadvantaged narrowly. The numbers confirm what any reasonable person should be able to ascertain themselves through anecdotal evidence if they have a television and an internet connection.
A ProPublica analysis found that statistics were even more stark for teenagers. Black teens were 21 times more likely to be killed than white teens from 2010-2012.
The authors determined that more than 1 white teen would have to have been killed by police per week over that three-year period for both groups to have an equal likelihood.
A Guardian analysis of data accumulated for the first five months of 2015 was nearly identical to the Vox analysis. The Guardian found 29 percent of those killed by police were black, versus 50 percent who were white.
Additionally, the Guardian found that twice as many blacks as whites killed by the police were likely to be unarmed (32 percent to 15 percent). The paper quoted the executive director of human rights organisation Amnesty International USA, Steven Hawkins, as calling the statistics “startling . . . the disparity speaks to something that needs to be examined, to get to the bottom of why you’re twice as likely to be shot if you’re an unarmed black male.”
As a whole, the United States incarcerates more of its population than anywhere else in the world. A Pew Research Centre analysis reported that black men are six times more likely than white men to be imprisoned. The study demonstrates that the incarceration rate for blacks has worsened since before Civil Rights legislation was enacted in 1964. “In 1960, the white male incarceration rate was 262 per 100,000 white U.S. residents, and the black male rate was 1,313, meaning that black men were five times as likely as white men to be incarcerated,” according to the Pew analysis.
There is no other country on the planet that locks up a racial minority group at remotely near the rate the United States does with African Americans. Even under the notorious racism of the apartheid regime in South Africa, blacks were not imprisoned nearly as much as in the United States.
Life expectancy is one of the most important indicators of public health. The life expectancy of blacks (74.5 years) is more than four years less than that of whites (78.8 years), according to a Center for Disease Control and Prevention study published last year. This is actually a “historically record-low level” of difference in life expectancy, although it is still outrageously high for a developed nation with the wealth of the United States.
The numbers for wealth inequality are just as stark. The gap between median white net worth ($141,900) is 13 times greater than that of black net worth ($11,000), according to the Pew Research Center. They report that in the wake of the “Great Recession” that began in 2008 the difference has been exacerbated.
Every other significant economic indicator — income, home ownership, unemployment — confirms the enormous chasm between whites and blacks.
No amount of conservative denial can erase these facts. Of course, if you remove the context and look at individual stories in a vacuum you can distort the extent of the oppression. There are more than 40 million African Americans in the US and so far this year there have been somewhere between 100 and 200 killings of blacks by police.
Naturally, not every black person is being killed.
But the rate people are being killed is much too high compared to other ethnic groups inside the country and to other countries overall.
Online Reporter