In the time I have been researching racism, I have run across many statistics which I find alarming. For the purpose of this blog, we will use the following statistics–remembering that Blacks comprise 13% of the US population. What is the reason for the overrepresentation of Blacks in crime statistics?
Drug usage is roughly equivalent as a percentage of the White and Black populations. 35% of all drug arrestees are Black.
Fifty percent of all murders in the US are perpetrated by Blacks.
A report in 2019 showed that in Multnomah County, OR (Portland) Blacks were 8.3 times more likely than whites to be in jail pending trial, 4.8 times as likely as whites to have a case prosecuted and 4.6 times as likely as whites to have a case resulting in conviction.
What is the reason for these obvious disparities? Some people who argue against the existence of racism in our world state that poverty is the true cause of these disparities. Whether we acknowledge racism or not, poverty does need to be recognized for being a major contributor to crime and by extension to these disparities.
Though the age may vary depending on their development, one of the question that can drive a parent crazy is the recurring “Why?”. Maybe you like me, tried to dodge some of these barrages by providing a “final answer” such as–because that is the way God made it. But then you realized there is no final answer as you heard that word once more–“Why?”.
It seems to me, we would do well to ask that question more frequently than we do. If our answer to the Black overrepresentation is poverty, we need to follow up that question with “Why?”. Why do so many Blacks (over 20%) live in poverty?
Do you know what the poverty threshold is in the United States? It is much lower than I imagined. For an individual, it is $12,784–that is about $6 an hour. For a family of four, the poverty line is at $25,701. As you can see, there is much poverty even over the poverty threshold.
Back to the question, why are so many Blacks in poverty? There is no one answer but many contributing factors.
Some of the laws of science are helpful in identifying reasons when viewed through the social lense. Newton’s first law of motion, that “an object at rest tends to remain there until acted upon by another force”, is illustrative of our reluctance to change. It is much easier to stay where I am than it is to change. It is much easier to stay where I grew up than it is to move to another town, county or state–it is all I know. We can see how that mindset contributes to the next generation continuing the cycle.
Who would have thought we would mention hysteresis in a discussion about racism and poverty? Wikipedia describes hysteresis as the dependence of the state of a system on its history. That definition seems to me to be an excellent explanation of what has happened in the Black community.
Why are so many Blacks in poverty? When you have 350 years of slavery and institutionalized racism, it doesn’t go away just because laws are changed. Up until 1968, redlining was legal in our country. This was the intentional segregation in housing eliminating the possibility for a person of color to live in certain neighborhoods–and, of course, those neighborhoods were never poor ones. When a person is prevented from home ownership in desirable neighborhoods, consequences include exclusion from one of the most common ways of creating wealth–home ownership, and being stuck with the less desirable.
Newton’s third law of motion can be simplified to say, for every action there is a reaction. It has been true for years across the country, that a disproportionate amount of Blacks are pulled over in traffic stops. Regardless of the reason for this statistic, if you are a part of a group that is more likely to be stopped by a police officer, this will affect both your perception of a police officer and what you tell your kids.
In White families, when someone mentions having “the talk” with their children, they are referring to sex. But when many Black families have “the talk”, they are providing cautions to their children as to how to act when stopped by the police.
I believe in order to get ratings, the media is a big contributor to this narrative. It seems that the tone would suggest a Black’s number one threat would be a police officer but over that last year, while 15 too many unarmed Blacks were killed by police officers, over 8000 were killed by other Blacks.
Is it racism or poverty causing more Blacks to be arrested, sentenced, and convicted of crimes? The answer is not simple and both have played a part.
Some people say time heals, but the truth is what is going on during that time allows for healing to take place. May we be contributors to healing by the way we treat the hurting.
Next week we will talk about institutional racism vs personal responsibility.