Even though the subject may not be trending on Facebook anymore, black lives still matter, and the issue still deserves our attention.
When the national debate on the Black Lives Matter movement reached its peak in mid-July, I read some alarmingly racist statements online, seemingly supported by the facts.
Commenters quoted the FBI, which reports that 40 percent of cop killings occur at the hands of black offenders, to explain why they’re disproportionately shot by police.
On a CNN panel, retired New York Police Department detective Harry Houck provided statistics demonstrating how blacks are more “prone to criminality” than whites in terms of robberies and violent crime.
It is true that the percentage of cops killed by blacks is 178 percent higher than their representation in the overall population and 31 percent lower for whites, which means that blacks kill police at a rate of more than five times that of whites.
Conservatives use these facts and figures as a way to justify the disproportionate number of blacks who are incarcerated and are victims of police brutality.
With the so-called facts on their side, conservatives feel vindicated in their racism and comfortable enough to say that blacks are simply more violent and more criminal than whites, and, in essence, that they deserve to be incarcerated or killed by the police.
From a historical, cultural and sociological perspective, these statistics don’t tell the whole story.
It’s not race but poverty that is linked with criminality. Researchers at Villanova University found reductions in poverty in both black and white neighborhoods saw similar statistically significant reductions in crime.
Nationally, blacks have the highest poverty rate, at 27.4 percent. This rate is 2.5 times that of whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
However, don’t assume blacks are in poverty because they’re lazy, less skilled or less employable.
Blacks are kept in poverty because of the racism that exists in our social economics due to factors such as employers who are less likely to hire applicants with black-sounding names.
Still, sociology and culture aren’t everything. This issue also has historical explanations.
The police force in the United States began as slave patrol. Yes, that’s completely true.
While that’s certainly not their job now, the remnants of this history are evident in racial profiling.
According to the National Institute of Justice, “Research has verified that people of color are more often stopped than whites,” and police frequently patrol minority neighborhoods more than white ones.
White people aren’t convicted of killing police or committing robbery and other violent crimes at a rate as high as blacks because police disproportionately target and interact with black neighborhoods.
The police would probably tell you that they do so because that’s where all the crime is, which, as I’ve shown, is due to poverty, not race.
So when we talk about the fact that blacks are executed on the street by police at a disproportionately high rate and about the percentage of violent crime committed by blacks, we need to be talking about every other social system and institution that affects these statistics.
I assure you, the amount of melanin in the pigments of a person’s skin does not determine behavior— criminality included.
thshowal@indiana.edu
@TherinShowalter
