America has done a pretty good job of getting the middle
class to fear poor black guys instead of rich white men.
Consider Mike Brown Exhibit, oh I don’t know, 1,000,001.
Because that’s a rough guesstimate the number of
African-American men currently enmeshed in the gears of the US penal system, incarcerated
in prisons, held in jails , on probation, or on parole or, in sum, as the Pew
Charitable Trust put it in 2009, “under correctional control.”
.
Correctional control
rates are highly concentrated by race and geography: 1 in 11 black adults (9.2 percent) versus 1 in 27 Hispanic adults
(3.7 percent) and 1 in 45 white adults (2.2 percent); 1 in 18 men (5.5 percent)
versus 1 in 89 women (1.1 percent). The rates can be extremely high in
certain neighborhoods. In one block-group of Detroit's East Side, for
example, 1 in 7 adult men (14.3 percent) is under correctional control.
The black adult male population aged 18 to 64 roughs out at
about 12 million x 9.2%, well you get the picture.
More recent data for incarceration rates are at the U.S.
government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics:
Total 478Male 904 White 466 Black 2,805 Hispanic 1,134 Other 963Female 65 White 51 Black 113 Hispanic 66 Other 90
In other words, black male adults are six times more likely
to be in prison than the population as a whole, three times more than the
average for the male population. More
than one third of the state and federal prison population (540,000+ out of
about 1.5 million) is black.
As to whether this is an unfortunate coincidence born of
particular patterns of misbehavior among African Americans, I have my doubts.
Fact is, to characterize this issue as fundamentally one of
racism—though excellent and important work has done on the persistence of
racism and its role in selective enforcement and incarceration, particularly in
the area of drug laws--may, in my opinion, actually miss the point.
Maybe it reflects the use of race-biased law enforcement to
reinforce the narrative that America’s problem is Mr. African-American Adult
Male…
…while the problem—and the solution—may actually be
somewhere else.
My personal suspicion is that the US political and social
system has a vested interest in black alienation.
Maybe it is good politics to abuse African Americans, goad
and provoke them, escalate the fear and anger on both sides, force an angry
reaction and respond with a fear-laden counterreaction, so an economically
disadvantaged community has its hands full staying out of jail and not getting
shot, and isn’t thinking about forming common cause with other disadvantaged or
less-advantaged groups to stick it to the rich guy in the next election.
In other words, it’s not Fear of a Black Voting Bloc; it’s
Fear of a Unified Lower & Middle Class Voting Bloc.
And alienation cuts both ways.
Other groups are more concerned with the undeniable and
understandable anger in the black community, and worrying about its
consequences for them—and looking out for Number 1--than they are in finding
common ground.
One of the most interesting transitions occurred in the
1990s, as far as I can remember. Old
fashioned Democratic liberalism and its doppelganger, noblesse oblige white
shoe Republicanism, fell by the wayside.
I associated old liberalism with the idea that problems existed in
society, and it was up to an enlightened electorate to remedy them using the
interventionist power of the government as channeled and constrained by the
constitution. Silly me.
What came after, with the collapse of communism, I guess,
and its perceived challenge to the Western formula for social justice, was the
idea of neo-liberalism, that there was a near-perfect set of constitutional,
electoral, and economic mechanisms, and interference with those mechanisms is
what caused the problems. So it was up
to disadvantaged groups to use the machinery properly, and up to the society to
enforce the criminal and political rules that kept the bad, the greedy, and
misguided from gumming up the works.
System’s workin’ but some people ain’t working hard enough. That’s the problem.
If my model’s right, black political agency was attacked
pretty much the same way that the union power was destroyed, by demonizing its
demands as false entitlement and denigrating its needs as a call for privilege
that degraded the overall functioning and fairness of the system.
In other words, it’s up to America’s most marginalized,
underprivileged, and over-incarcerated minority to solve its problems before we
can talk about shared problems. In other
words, never gonna happen. And for some
people, that’s just fine.
Not just the hyper rich.
For Mr. White Middle Class Americans, pressure’s off. Just sit back and let the miracle of liberal
free market democracy work while the cops keep the troublemakers bottled up. We’ll cut your taxes and put more cops on the
streets. Hell, I’ll take that deal. Hell, I took that deal.
But the problems—the alienation—seems to be getting worse
instead of better.
So it doesn’t seem surprising that the system might have a
vested interest in encouraging and escalating black alienation, so it makes sense
that local police are shooting and killing young black men, women, and children.
As to whether this was a conscious plan or some ineluctable alchemy
of class and race relations, well, I guess I’ll leave that to the philosophers
for a while.
But for the time being, I guess the message is Black Lives
Matter More Than White Privilege. That
includes Mike Brown’s life…and my privileges.