Why are 1.5 Million Black Men MISSING?
April 27, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In speaking to the situation facing Black and Latino people in the U.S.—mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline, the criminalization and demonization of a whole generation of youth, the overt or just-below-the-surface racism prevalent in society, etc.—Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party has said what is taking place is a slow genocide that could easily become a fast genocide. The word “genocide” comes from the ancient root words “genos” (people) and “cide” (killing)—according to the UN, genocide is the deliberate imposition on a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group of “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This regular feature highlights aspects of this slow genocide.
A front page article in the April 20 New York Times carried the headline: “1.5 Million Missing Black Men.”
The article, by Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, starts with this:
“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.”
Among cities with sizable Black populations: The largest single gap is in Ferguson, Missouri—where Michael Brown was killed: 40 missing Black men for every 100 Black women. North Charleston, SC, has a gap larger than 75 percent of cities: 25 missing Black men for every 100 Black women.
This gap, the authors explain, is driven mostly by incarceration and early deaths. And this gap—between men and women in the population—is something that barely exists among white people, where the statistic is only 1 missing white man for every 100 white women.
This IS real evidence of the slow GENOCIDE this system is carrying out on Black people in this country.
The article goes on to add up more “missing Black men”:
“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.”
More than one out of every six Black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old has disappeared from daily life. And they are missing largely because of EARLY DEATH and because THEY ARE BEHIND BARS.
Of the 1.5 million missing Black men from 25 to 54, which demographers consider “prime-age”:
* Higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000. Almost one in 12 Black men in this age group are behind bars, compared with one in 60 non-Black men in the same age group; one in 200 Black women and one in 500 non-Black women.
* Higher mortality accounts for about 900,000 fewer prime-age Black men than women in the United States. Homicide is the leading cause of death for young African-American men. Heart and respiratory disease and accidents play a big role in these higher mortality rates.
In real life terms, this means tens of thousands of Black men being locked up, sometimes for decades, sometimes going in and out of prison—impacting families and whole communities where husbands, sons, and fathers are MISSING.
The very workings of this system and its deep inequalities are the root cause of these early deaths: Police murder, lack of decent health care, and lack of education and jobs force people into all kinds of situations that lead to early deaths.
When you add the numbers up, according to this article: “There are more missing African-American men nationwide than there are African-American men residing in all of New York City—or more than in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Washington and Boston, combined.”
These “missing Black men” are the genocidal outcome of a system that has no future for millions and millions of Black youth. A system that shut down its factories and moved them overseas to make higher profits—taking away millions of jobs that had employed Black men and allowed them to survive and provide for their families. It is the outcome of a system where millions of Black youth have found themselves in the underground, sometimes illegal economy, trying to survive—then hit with a massive “war on drugs” feeding mass incarceration in this country. If they manage to get out of prison, they are stigmatized and denied all kinds of rights in housing, employment, education, and more.
These “missing Black men” are the genocidal outcome of a system that has de-industrialized its cities and at the same time cut back all kinds of social services in poor communities, leaving people with very little health care, decent education, and housing.
These “missing Black men” are the genocidal outcome of a system that systematically criminalizes young Black men—targets them even in childhood, turns schools into pipelines to prison, justifies their incarceration by blaming them for the impossible situation that this very system has put them in—telling them that it is “their fault” that they cannot “make it” in this society.
The reality of 1.5 million missing Black men is the reality of the slow genocide of Black men in the United States of America.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.