Black Americans have been treated unfairly and unjustly for years throughout American history. Even today, black people still are being treated unfairly even with the justice system that is supposed to be equal for all.
Over the course of many years, black Americans have been targeted by police officers in a series of shootings. This sparked racial tension between blacks and whites over the years, especially within the last five years. The hostility between both races originally sparked back in the 1980s was known as the “War on Drugs”: the United States government’s prohibition of drugs. During the era, black Americans were thought to make up about half of those incarcerated out of the 2.3 million that were arrested during the drug epidemic. Another statistic calculated that blacks were incarcerated six times the rate of white people. 14 million whites were reported to have used illicit drugs versus 2.6 million black people reported to have used an illicit drug. These stats state that white people were using illegal drugs five times more than black people. However, black people were being arrested for drug offenses 10 times the rate of white people. It doesn’t help that most of the black people that were arrested for drug offenses were from the inner cities. Black people were 80% of the people sentenced for transgressions of crack cocaine laws under the federal government. Two-thirds of all the people using crack cocaine were white or Hispanic. Black Americans also served more time for drug offenses than whites do who committed violent offenses. It has also been proven that only 12% of black people were drugs users, but made up 32% of the persons arrested for possession of drugs. The prisons’ recidivism rates were higher for black males and young adults. 82 percent of drug offenders that lived in poverty went back to jail for committing another crime.
Racial tension has risen because of a series of white police officers killing unarmed black people -- particularly black men. However, white people are killed more by police officers than any other race, including African Americans and other people of color in the United States. But the 2015 database to track police shooting ended in a fatality. 1,502 people were killed by police since January 2015. 731 of the people were Caucasian, 381 victims were other people of color, while the remaining 382 victims were African American. Policing experts did a study on how often white people were killed versus black people based on police shooting alone. The most recent census concluded that there are 160 million more white people in this country than black people in this country. Caucasians make up about 62 percent of the population in America but statistically make up about 49 percent of victims by police killings. However, black people only make up about 13 percent of the United States population but account for 24 percent of all people killed by the police. Even though 49 percent is higher than 24 percent, due to the population analysis, black people are 2.5 times more likely to be shot and killed by police than white people are. About thirteen percent of black Americans being shot by police were unarmed versus 7 percent of unarmed whites.
Political conservatives and police unions argue that there is too much violence in the black community. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “If you want to deal with this on the black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police; the real danger to them, 99 out of 100 times, 9,900 out of 10,000 times, are other blacks kids who are going to kill them. That’s the way they’re gonna die.” The New York Daily News noted that Giuliani was wrong about black-on-black crime. Back in 2014, crime statistics from the FBI calculated that 90 percent of homicide victims that were black were committed by other blacks. Although white-on-white crime was less than black-on-black crime (white-on-white was 83 percent), there was an analysis done by the Washington Post that concluded that there was no correlation between violent crimes and police killings.
The Black Lives Matter movement was created after the killing of Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder he committed against Martin. Black people all over the country decided to stand against the demonization and dehumanization of black people in this country. The movement was to create a way to fight against anti-black racism. Black people want to no longer be in a position where they are systematically and intentionally targeted based on the color of their skin.
This is not an anti-white article. This is simply an article to bring awareness to a minority group who still faces hardship based on being black. The justice system is not on the side of minorities. There are still problems in the black community that we, as black people, need to fix, but there also needs to be conversation about the crimes that still happen today against black people. Black Lives Matter was and is for ALL black lives, including the black people that are murdered by other black people.
By Najae W.