The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks - Hysterical White Middle Class BLM Activism

[Aegon]

Redlining - a crime of the past. And, no I will not be "examining my own racial biases" as they don't exist, and I find the conjecture that they do insulting and condescending.

Very bold of you to think that narratives you've been sold since birth don't have an impact on your psychology today, since that would make you... not human. But then again, you're in the UK? So you won't really be able to understand race relations and you won't have the same implicit biases that Americans have.

I'll assume you're legitimately interested and that this won't be a waste of time like the last occasion I wrote this up:

Here's the issue: the whole system, from a fundamental level, is stacked against black Americans. History is not compartmentalized, though we're taught that it is. Rather, what happens today only happens because of what happened yesterday. The state has manufactured poverty in black communities. Here's a tiny snippet of how they did that:

Soon after the 13th amendment was passed and Reconstruction-era troops were pulled out of the South, black people were arrested for little to no reason just to be able to enslave them (because, to this day, slavery is technically legal in the US as long as the enslaved are prisoners. It's explicitly stated in the 13th amendment). Any prosperous black community (such as Wilmington, North Carolina in the late 1890s and Tulsa, Oklahoma in the late 1910s) were violently overthrown by white supremacists, and the first league of black congressmen were physically, literally forced out of office. 

As cities, towns, and suburbs became more evolved in the 1930s and 1940s, a process began called redlining, as you saw. This was when (obviously white-controlled) government agencies started to draw maps dividing cities into sections that were either desirable or undesirable for investment. This usually blocked off entire black neighborhoods from access to private and public investment. Banks and insurance companies used these maps for decades to deny black people loans and other services based purely on race. Think of all the ways one can build wealth... on top of slavery, slavery via imprisonment, the actions of white supremacists, and now lack of investment have all stopped African-Americans from building wealth that they could then pass on to future generations (unlike many white families in the US, who had little trouble securing loans for houses and college education). As late as the 1980s, an investigation into the Atlanta real estate market showed that banks were more willing to lend to low-income white families than to middle or upper income African-American families. And in Nassau County in New York, the county where I grew up which is considered to currently be the most segregated county in America, this practice persists today.

A bit stupid to imply redlining is a "crime of the past," when it directly impacted ability to build wealth for future generations.

This is where it becomes obvious that African-Americans, through no significant fault of their own, were trapped in poverty. The impacts of all this, of course, add up. Crime is associated with poverty, and many crimes (i.e, robbing) happen because of the situation the criminal is in (i.e. extreme poverty). Robbery happens at the highest income levels, of course, but at that point we just call it free market capitalism, and the most common form of theft in America is WAGE THEFT. But anyway, let's not get sidetracked.

In 1971, Richard Nixon started "the war on drugs." It was sold as a moral decision, the government's efforts to get harmful substances off the streets. That's not what it was for. Nixon's own domestic policy aide, John Ehrlichman, said so:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

The government literally looked for an excuse to put black men in prison, so they manufactured one. It only got worse under the Reagan administration. Under Reagan, the CIA literally helped traffic crack-cocaine from Nicaragua into inner cities. I know, what the fuck, right? Look that one up some time. Despite the fact that the government was complicit in the high amounts of crack in these majority-black communities, Reagan came down hard and began perpetuating racist stereotypes. A media frenzy around the crack epidemic created a hysteria that meant support for his law-and-order policy approach to drug use. Prison populations soared as African Americans were targeted by law enforcement — despite using drugs at similar rates to whites (hell, there were white celebrities touting "Just Say No" who used cocaine themselves. A ton of rich, powerful white people used the same drugs that African-Americans were being imprisoned for at record rates.) Crack-cocaine became wrongly associated with black people and the police responded accordingly. To this day there are clear disparities in the enforcement of drug possession. Despite studies showing white Americans and black Americans use illicit drugs at the same rate, and yet more than one in four people arrested for drug law violations in 2015 was black. In regards to weed specifically (the dumbest drug to enforce laws against), ACLU found that blacks were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites in 2010, even though their rate of marijuana usage was, like other illicit drugs, comparable. 

Not to mention mandatory minimum sentences, which were another part of the war on drugs that hurt African-Americans more than it should have. Research shows that prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for black people as for white people charged with the same offense. Nearly 80% of people in federal prison and almost 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are black or Latino. So now we're not just talking about communities trapped in poverty (for reasons mentioned earlier), policed unfairly (for reasons mentioned earlier), but now these communities are crippled by the amount of members of that community that are imprisoned for long periods of time. 

In recent years, black drivers have been somewhat more likely to be stopped than whites but have been far more likely to be searched and arrested. The causes and outcomes of these stops differ by race, and staggering racial disparities in rates of police stops persist in certain jurisdictions—pointing to unchecked racial bias, whether intentional or not, in officer discretion. A closer look at the causes of traffic stops reveals that police are more likely to stop black and Hispanic drivers for discretionary reasons—for “investigatory stops” (proactive stops used to investigate drivers deemed suspicious) rather than “traffic-safety stops” (reactive stops used to enforce traffic laws or vehicle codes). Nationwide surveys also reveal disparities in the outcomes of police stops. Once pulled over, black and Hispanic drivers were three times as likely as whites to be searched (6% and 7% versus 2%) and blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested. These patterns hold even though police officers generally have a lower “contraband hit rate” when they search black versus white drivers. Black people are more likely to be killed by law enforcement than other racial or ethnic groups. They are often stereotyped as being violent or addicted to alcohol and other drugs, for aforementioned reasons. Experts believe that stigma and racism may play a major role in police-community interactions. How could they not?

Check out some of these metrics:

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/wealth/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/infant-medium.jpg[/img]

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/unemployment/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/maternal-medium.jpg[/img]

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/incomepoverty/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/incomepoverty-medium.jpg[/img]

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/wealth/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/wealth-medium.jpg[/img]


[size=small][size=small][size=small][size=small]In regards to Obama's presidency "solving racism in America," I direct you to an essay by a great writer, Ta-Nihesi Coates:

Fear of a Black President

Prelude: As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

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Why the fuck is my post littered with [size=small] lol

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Fixed the images of said metrics: