*Over decades, as the demographics of violence have drastically changed, the narrative of intrinsic ‘black culture’ at the heart of the violence problem in the country has remained consistent, if not escalated. This rhetoric is gravely flawed for obvious reasons but continues to be sponsored by certain segment and entities in society.
Let’s start off by listing some facts as per ACLU and the Center for American Progress:
- African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.
- African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites, even though 5 times as many Whites are using drugs.
- The federal system sentences black offenders to 10% longer terms than white offenders for the same crime.
- African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rates of Whites.
- Being only 16% of the youth population, African American juvenile youth have 37% of their cases moved to the criminal court & 58% of those convicted are sent to adult prison.
- African American defendants are 21% more likely to given mandatory minimum sentences than whites and around 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison.
- Incarcerations are three times higher in African American women than white women.
Generally, when analyzing criminal activity in blacks, people tend to skew between two perspectives, one that believes that systematic social problems such as racism and inequality are to blame, while the second type links the community’s beliefs and values to their tendency for crime. The second idea, though widespread, is deeply flawed.
If that were the case then the crime demographics would have stayed constant or gotten worse with time as the populations grew. Philadelphia’s murder rate, for example, fell from 31.7 per 100,000 people in 1990 to 20.1 per 100,000 in 2010, even though the population grew from 39.9 to 43.4 percent.
The greater violence in the black community relative to others is a result of a criminal justice system that both under and over-policies them. Often harassed by police for petty crimes such as traffic rules, drugs or simply loitering, the same law-enforcement fails to tackle violent crimes such as homicides in the community.
Moreover, the issue with labeling the problem as a cultural one is that it is vague, makes clear solutions difficult to pen out, and suggests that the tendencies are inherent to the entire group, even though a tiny fraction of the population is complicit. A common strategy to ignorantly feed into these myths is to point at black-on-black violence. In truth, the rate of Black-on-black homicide has decreased by 67% in 20 years, a sharper decrease than in white-on-white homicide. This fact is mostly overlooked because it doesn’t support the status quo narrative.
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