http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/21/1379162/-The-Unspoken-American-Experience-1-500-000-Missing-Black-Men?detail=email
this my friends is a long read but very informative, i don't want to use my eye up on one article sorry i saw it late, i'm sure you understand. i will highlight some key issues but limit my response those who have been with me for a while know my opinions and feelings. please check this out.
Many of us knew this intuitively, but the numbers are still shocking:
For every 100 black women not in jail, there are only 83 black men. The remaining men – 1.5 million of them – are, in a sense, missing.
Using data collected from the 2010 Census, Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, writing for The Upshot in the New York Times, attempt to account for those African-American males "'missing" from everyday life in the U.S.A: missing Dads, sons, grandfathers, brothers, coworkers, comrades, compadres, neighbors, and friends. They are "missing" in the sense that they are, for the most part, either dead from premature or unnatural causes-- such as homicide--or imprisoned.
They are not part of what we know as society. They are completely absent. They do not count, except as statistics. Black males, for example, are six times more likely to be imprisoned than white males. The biggest reason they are imprisoned is for drug-related offenses. Blacks make up 50% of the people incarcerated for drug crimes in state and local prisons, at a rate 10 times more than whites, even though five times as many whites use drugs as do African-Americans.
Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life...Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million.
If a comparable epidemic of "missing white men" (or white women) existed in this country it's beyond question that a transformative cultural reckoning would occur to discover and correct the cause. The media would be shouting from the rooftops, white families would be marching in the streets, our Republican Congress would be busily speechifying and passing laws instead of trying to deny the entire country an Attorney General based on her race, while simultaneously stoking more racism against immigrant Hispanics and Latinos as their "justification."
But there is no such "gap" of "missing whites and no such cultural reckoning has taken place, There is no media outcry. To the contrary, racism is so pervasive and endemic to this country that its consequences have gradually become an accepted fact of what we euphemistically regard as the
Incarceration and early deaths are the overwhelming drivers of the gap. Of the 1.5 million missing black men from 25 to 54 — which demographers call the prime-age years — higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000. Almost 1 in 12 black men in this age group are behind bars, compared with 1 in 60 nonblack men in the age group, 1 in 200 black women and 1 in 500 nonblack women.
Higher mortality is the other main cause. About 900,000 fewer prime-age black men than women live in the United States, according to the census. It’s impossible to know precisely how much of the difference is the result of mortality, but it appears to account for a big part. Homicide, the leading cause of death for young African-American men, plays a large role, and they also die from heart disease, respiratory disease and accidents more often than other demographic groups, including black women.
The gap doesn't exist in childhood. There are as many African-American baby boys as there are African-American baby girls. But as they begin to reach their twenties and thirties, American society begins to winnow the males out, one way or another, by sending them to prison at disproportionate rates, or sometimes more permanently, by gunning them down in the street in places like Ferguson, Missouri:
And what is the city with at least 10,000 black residents that has the single largest proportion of missing black men? Ferguson, Mo. , where a fatal police shooting last year led to nationwide protests and a Justice Department investigation that found widespread discrimination against black residents. Ferguson has 60 men for every 100 black women in the age group,Stephen Bronars, an economist, has noted.
In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.
Racism in the U.S. has a reinforcing, almost feedback-loop character where symptoms are deliberately mistaken for causes, simply to justify more racism. The stark reduction in numbers of available African-American men, for example, is rightly blamed for the fact that African-American women are heads of households, and often working and raising children by themselves.
This in turn feeds the right's stereotype about the attitudes and behavior of black men while conveniently ignoring the fact that if vast numbers of white men were similarly "disappeared" from American society the same types of social imbalances would occur to white women. It also provides a convenient excuse for conservatives to blame others while ignoring the real problems that face both single-parent female households and black males, such as poverty and lack of good jobs.
The self-justifying character of racism goes a long way towards explaining why it seems to cling perpetually to this nation, decade after decade. The modern Republican Party owes its existence and appeal to the continual, perpetual exploitation of racism. Stoking racist impulses (like tying the confirmation of a black Attorney General to immigrant-bashing) is how Republicans motivate their base to vote, even when those voters end up voting against programs such as the Affordable Care Act and other social programs that largely benefit white Americans. In this respect, racism may be the most powerful of motivators in American political culture. And these are the consequences:
African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.
i put up more than i thought but less than i want it seems the entire article is relevant and the issues stated more than relevant at best those who don't or won't except the fact of racism practiced i American politics as well as states and cities and towns and neighborhoods and it's impact on Black life while look again with different eyes, at worst those mentioned above ignore and the racial beat goes on. what's your choice???
