Chronicle EditorGlen Ford and Sophia Kerby
“There are more Black men missing from their communities than the combined Black male populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington and Boston.”
A new analysis of population data confirms what has long been obvious to every minimally conscious Black person in the United States: a huge proportion of the Black male population is missing, physically absent from the daily life of the community.
Many are prematurely dead, but the largest group has been consigned to the social death of incarceration.
According to a study by the Upshot unit of the New York Times, when prison inmates of both sexes are taken out of the equation, there are now 1.5 million more Black women in the country, age 25 to 54, than there are Black men.
In some locations — for example, Ferguson, Missouri — there are only six Black men physically present in the community for every 10 Black women.
In white America, there is almost no imbalance in gender among the 25 to 54 age group. For every 100 white women, there are 99 white men.
There are more Black men missing from their communities than the combined Black male populations of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington and Boston.
Six hundred thousand of them are in prison, and that’s not counting Black male prison inmates that are younger than 25 and older than 54.
The analysts estimate that roughly half, and maybe as many as three-quarters, of the other 900 000 missing Black men have died before their time from diseases and accidents, and that 200 000 are no longer here due to homicide.
Black life in America does not start out with these bizarre imbalances between the sexes.
There is no gender gap among Blacks in childhood.
Roughly the same number of boys and girls are born, and the ratio stays stable until the teenage years, when the war of attrition begins mercilessly grinding down the numbers of Black males.
How else is this phenomenon to be described except as a war, in which 600 000 are held captive during their most productive years, 200 000 are killed by violence, and most of the rest go to early graves from accidents and diseases that cause far lower casualties among whites.
The data shows that US society has become much more toxic for Black men during the very period in which Blacks were supposedly making such fantastic “progress.”
The numbers show that the missing-Black-men phenomenon “began growing in the middle decades of the 20th century.”
The increasing ratio of Black women to men is primarily a product of the age of mass Black incarceration.
The war of attrition is a race war deliberately and methodically initiated by the US government, the effects of which have been devastating to Black society on the most fundamental level: stunting the formation of Black families and the Black American group as a whole by physically removing and eliminating the men.
The data support a totally plausible, factually grounded charge of genocide, based on international law.
The US government, through its mass Black incarceration policies of the last half century, has been guilty of a) “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as well as b) “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”
The facts bear witness to the indictment. So do 1.5 million missing Black men.
A broken criminal-justice system has proven that America still has a long way to go in achieving racial equality.
Today people of colour continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts.
Further, racial disparities in the criminal-justice system threaten communities of colour — disenfranchising thousands by limiting voting rights and denying equal access to employment, housing, public benefits, and education to millions more.
In light of these disparities, it is imperative that criminal-justice reform evolves as the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
Some facts include:
l While people of colour make up about 30 percent of the US population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned.
The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates.
The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of colour: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
l According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Individuals of colour have a disproportionate number of encounters with law enforcement, indicating that racial profiling continues to be a problem.
l Students of colour face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of colour incarcerated. Black and Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement.
l African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates.
l African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison.
African American women are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated,
l People of colour are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but they have higher rate of arrests.
African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offences.
l 13 percent of African American men are denied the right to vote due to felony-disenfranchisement policies.
l Following release from prison, wages grow at a 21 percent slower rate for black former inmates compared to white ex-convicts.
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