Revolution#121, February 24, 2008
What kind of system offers this to Black youth in the United States?
What kind of system takes millions of Black youth and consigns them to segregated run-down neighborhoods and prison-like schools? Offers them lower paying, demeaning jobs—if at all—when they seek employment? Treats their style of dress or way they talk as evidence of criminal behavior? Makes “behind bars” more familiar than “campus classroom”? Destroys all hopes and dreams, and leaves only desperation?
Why keep a system that does this?
The inequity is indisputable. America’s jail and prison population has soared to 2.2 million—the size of a small country, and the highest incarceration rate in the world.1 While only 12% of the U.S. population, Black people make up 40% of those incarcerated.2 By 2006, 1 out of every 9 Black men between 25 and 29 was locked up.3 Over a lifetime, one out of every three Black youth will spend time in prison.4
It’s not that crime has caused increased incarceration. According to U.S. Department of Justice studies, the overall crime rate has actually decreased over the past 30 years, with the violent crime rate dropping to its lowest overall record in 2003.5 While government reports indicate that drug use has remained relatively constant, and significantly less than when the “war on drugs” began, arrests for drug-related crimes have soared since the ’80s.6 While whites and Blacks report using and selling drugs at similar rates, a study of large population counties in the U.S. showed that Black people went to prison at 10 times the rate of white people.7
Feeding this frenzy of incarceration is the systematic targeting and criminalizing of Black people. “Fitting the profile”—aka being Black—becomes an invitation for police harassment. In just one year (2007) in New York City, police stopped and frisked nearly 470,000 people. Over half were Black, and of those, only 13% were arrested or given a summons.8 Similar stories of abuse and harassment by police are commonplace in this nation’s cities, where simply being Black gets you treated as a criminal, brutalized and even killed.
The terror visited upon millions of Black people in America for generations past still stalks the night, as sheets and nooses have now become police uniforms and semi-automatics. The 3,450 Black people killed by KKK and lynch mobs between 1882 and 1968 have become the 3,500 Black “felons”—as the FBI described them—killed by police between 1976 and 1998—a figure that only includes what police departments have reported.9
Why keep a system that does all this?
The criminalization of Black people is no accident nor a mystery. A change in how capitalists accumulate their capital and decades of a constant chase for higher profit has deindustrialized cities, altered the economy, and destroyed lives. Beginning as far back as the late ’50s and early ’60s, the capitalists began to withdraw their industries from the cities and relocate—either to suburbs or to foreign countries. In just the last 6 years, over 3.5 million factory jobs have been lost—to bankruptcy, technological changes, or outsourcing to the global labor market in the search for the best return and lowest wage.10
Instead of a chance to earn a living, there is now increased competition for who gets to be exploited at the bottom end of the U.S. workforce for low-paying, high turnover jobs with little or no prospect of any advancement. In many cases companies reject unskilled Black workers and hire immigrants who, because of their desperate and precarious situation, more readily accept extremely low wages and horrendous work conditions.
For millions of Black workers, this has meant drastically diminishing job opportunities—so bad that the situation for Black youth seeking employment is worse than it was two generations ago. For many, the doors to any kind of job and any kind of decent future have been simply slammed shut, and people find themselves in a situation where, as one economist pointed out, “crime is a rational choice.”
The system considers millions of Black youth expendable because it can’t profitably exploit them. And a big part of the system’s answer to this is to criminalize and imprison increasing numbers of Black youth. The system rationalizes this by vilifying and dehumanizing Black youth—in effect painting the system’s victims as the criminals. And you have people like Bill Cosby blaming the oppressed for the horrible conditions the system itself has imposed on the people.
After centuries growing fat off the slave labor of Black people. After many decades stealing the last pennies from Black sharecroppers in the segregated South. After extracting millions more from Black folk slaving in factories and slaughter-houses. The development of capitalism in the U.S. and around the world has created a situation where millions of Black people—particularly millions of Black youth—are considered extraneous to the needs of the accumulation of capital. It is the workings of the capitalist system that is behind the fact that so many Black youth today are destined for the slave chains of prison—their lives, their future, their potential crushed.
There IS another way!
What if the people made revolution, took power, stripped control from the class of capitalist-imperialists and built an economy no longer based on extracting profit from human sweat and tears?
What if we used that power to distribute housing, food, healthcare and all the many qualities of life based on humanity’s needs and not whether it brings a profitable return on investment?
What if we were in a position to uproot the centuries of oppression that weigh Black people down, along with all the other degrading ways people must live and the ideas used to justify it?
What if we created a society where dissent, a questioning spirit, and the search for truth is really valued, where the people throughout society came together to debate, struggle out and figure out how to revolutionize every aspect of society?
What if we transformed the world, ourselves, and emancipated all humanity in a real communist society?
Wouldn’t that be worth making a revolution for?
1 Facts About Prisons and Prisoners, The Sentencing Project. 12/07 [http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cinc_factsaboutprisons.pdf][back]
2 ibid[back]
3 ibid[back]
4 ibid [back]
5 U.S. Department of Justice, BJS, 2003. “Violent crime rates have decreased to the lowest level ever recorded in 2003.”[back]
6 A 25-Year Quagmire: The "War on Drugs" and its impact on American society, The Sentencing Project, September 2007
[http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin%5CDocuments%5Cpublications%5Cdp_25yearquagmire.pdf][back]
7 The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties, A Justice Policy Institute Report, December 2007 [http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=69][back]
8 Reporter Victim of Racial Profiling is Cleared, Hundreds of Thousands of Innocent Black New Yorkers Stopped by NYPD in 2007, New York Civil Liberties Union, February 13, 2008 [http://www.nyclu.org/node/1631][back]
9 Lynching statistics from the Archives at the Tuskegee Institute [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html] Department of Justice statistics from "Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons"
[http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ph98.pdf][back]
10. “Manufacturing Job Losses Continue, Hit Black Workers Hardest,” by James Parks, AFL-CIONOWBLOG, Mar 2, 2007[http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/03/02/manufacturing-job-losses-continue-hit-black-workers-hardest/]“U.S. manufacturing jobs fading away fast,” by Barbara Hagenbaugh, USA TODAY, 12/12/2002 [http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2002-12-12-manufacture_x.htm][back]
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