Creation of the Black Criminal Stereotype
Modern Effects of the Black Criminality Myth
Creation of the Black Criminal Stereotype
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Source: society6.com/jonathanedwards
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- Creation of the Black Criminal Stereotype
- Justifications for European brutality during African colonization and enslavement
- Blacks were heathens, beasts, criminals that needed to be “civilized”
- Endorsed by Catholic church – Doctrine of Discovery, etc
- After slavery ended these stereotypes were used to continue the marginalization, brutalization, and defacto enslavement of black people
- Black codes, Vagrancy laws, Jim Crow, lynching, Convict Leasing, voter suppression, KKK, etc
- Lynching justify on belief black people were criminals that needed to be controlled violently
- Housing discrimination created markets that devalued black people lower due to stereotypes
- “Law and order” racist policies based on black criminal stereotypes fuel the rise of mass incarceration
- Justifications for European brutality during African colonization and enslavement
- Today, many white people have some form of black criminalization
- White people frequently call cops on innocent black people
- Police arrest, assault or kill black people at disproportionately higher rates when called
- Juries convict black people at high rates, while acquitting white cops at high rates
- Judges sentence black people to longer sentences
- Media often demonizes black victims, while praising cops for keeping white people safe
- Black victims are often victim blamed
- Schools suspend black students at disproportionately higher rates
- White people frequently call cops on innocent black people
“Part of this suspicion arises from commonly held stereotypes of black people as being criminal and black behavior as being deviant. As a result, black people in these “white spaces” are forced to justify their presence, and face consequences when that justification isn’t accepted by others.” Elijah Anderson – Yale sociologist
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“When Black criminality ceased, lynching would cease” President Roosevelt
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Brennan Center for Justice: Racism & Felony Disenfranchisement: An Intertwined History
The End of the Civil War: An Increasingly Racist Criminal Justice System
By the end of the Civil War, states were already incarcerating African Americans at a higher rate than whites. This disparity significantly worsened in the ensuing years, a fact well-documented in the South.
Although outlawing slavery itself, the Thirteenth Amendment carved out an exception allowing states to impose involuntary servitude on those who were convicted of crimes. Seeing an opportunity to sustain their crumbling economy, numerous Southern politicians quickly implemented new criminal laws that were “essentially intended to criminalize black life,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Blackmon. These ostensibly race-neutral laws were selectively enforced by a nearly all-white criminal justice system. While white people accused of crimes often escaped punishment, black people were arrested and convicted “almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process,” as Blackmon put it.
Identifying these new criminal laws as “Black Codes,” historian Eric Foner describes how they bolstered the South’s faltering economy by providing employers “with a supply of cheap labor” through convict leasing. This system was reserved nearly entirely for black prisoners — at least 90 percent of those forced into convict leasingarrangements were black. Because convict leasing generated significant profits for states, law enforcement officials, and companies alike, the practice incentivized baseless arrests and convictions of black citizens.
These factors and others spurred widening disparities in incarceration rates. In Alabama, for example, the percentage of nonwhite prisoners jumped from 2 percent in 1850, to 74 percent by 1870.
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Know Your Rights Camp: A Brief History Of The Idea Of The Black Male Criminal
Why are Black men, for instance, often thought to be dangerous criminals by mainstream white America despite evidence to the contrary?
To begin, Black men are not “naturally” more or less dangerous than non-Black men. The fact that Black men are criminalized at higher rates than non-Black men does not reflect differences in “innate criminality” but rather slanted applications of justice. The U.S. Department of Justice proves this claim when it finds that whereas Black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to have their cars searched, white drivers are considerably more likely in the same scenario to turn up with guns or drugs. Often, the reflex to criminalize certain bodies over others hinges on perceived—not actual— danger. And perceptions of danger are inherited through historical narratives aimed at producing and sustaining a white-dominant racial order.
So where and how did the manufactured linkage of Blackness, maleness, and criminality emerge? And further, how is it sustained?
Black people—and especially Black men— have been cast as the preeminent outlaws of the American imagination. Even before the U.S. Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause was ratified in 1788 (Article IV, Section II, Clause III), Virginia already had 73 laws on the books that would result in the death penalty for enslaved Black men, women, and children —and only one for white people. In fact, in 1657—fifty years after Africans were enslaved and transported to the territory that would become the United States—Virginia became the first colony to pass a fugitive slave law, a statute which effectively criminalized runaway slaves in pursuit of freedom from bondage.
Two decades after the enactment of the U.S. Constitution, Samuel Cartwright, a New Orleans physician and Confederate loyalist, argued that high rates of physical and mental illnesses afflicting enslaved Black persons were the products of the alleged cognitive inferiority of the “Black race.” In his 1815 “Report on the Disease and the Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Cartwright introduced what he called “Drapetomania,” known as the “Disease Causing Slaves to Run Away.” Unconvinced that enslaved Blackchildren, women, and men might naturally seek freedom, Cartwright instead claimed that Drapetomania could be cured by “kindness.” Cartwright’s new diagnostic category, in effect, pathologized the pursuit of Black emancipation.
In the immediate aftermath of slavery, mainstream white America strategically began to link ideas of violence and danger with Black maleness. As slaves, Black men were narrated as docile and generally subservient. As free people, however, the ideology of docility was replaced with the mystique of danger. During Reconstruction, white mainstream voices argued that Black men, whose predatory proclivities had allegedly been benevolently suppressed under slavery, would revert to their natural state of violence and criminality. Thus, the ideology of the Black brute was birthed.
From the 1890s-1940s, writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad in The Condemnation of Blackness, “black criminality would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world.” Moreover, according to one physician cited in the New York Medical Journal in 1886, Black people were “naturally intemperate” and prone to indulging “every appetite too freely, whether for food, drink, tobacco, or sensual pleasures, and sometimes to such an extent as to appear more of a brute than human.”
In conjunction with the ubiquity of scientific racism, the Black brute was depicted in popular culture and in politics as a congenital rapist of white women bent on undermining white racial purity through Black contamination. This interpretation quickly ascended as the prominent public rationalization for lynching Black men. At the turn of the 20th century popular Mississippi Representative Percy Quin claimed that there is “an element of barbarism in the black man.” In conjunction, Representative Thomas Sisson, also of Mississippi, argued that he and his white compatriots must “protect our girls and womenfolk from these black brutes. When these black fiends keep their hands off the throats of women of the South then the lynching will stop.” White politicians of the era constructed the image of the Black brute as an inherently violent super predator with an insatiable lust for white women and a conjoint wish to kill white men. The brute served as a two-pronged receptacle of white fear.
Despite these claims, however, there is no evidence to suggest that Black men in the postbellum south systematically enacted sexual violence upon white women or tried to murder white men en masse. In fact, such narrations say less about Black men and more about white men who created them. It was white men, not Black men, who engaged in the widespread rape of Black women during the eras of slavery and Reconstruction.
Historical efforts to make this history plain and to decenter the myth of the Black brute have themselves been met with visceral instances of violence and brutality. When Blackanti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett argued in the 1890s that most associations between white women and Black men were, in fact, consensual, a white mob destroyed the offices where her newspaper company was located.
The myth of the Black brute gained even further popularity in 1915 with the release of the (first) Hollywood Blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation. The three-hour film centers on the Ku Klux Klan’s Reconstruction-era “protection” of white women from the uncontrolled sexual aggressions of free Black men through the preferred intervention of the lynch mob. After the movie was screened at the White House President Woodrow Wilson reportedly said the film was “like writing history with lightning” and that his only regret was that its depictions were “all so terribly true.” The historical record, however, has long since shown its plot to be both unapologetically white supremacist and grossly unrepresentative of Reconstruction.
The myth of the Black brute is alive still today. According to the Justice Department, a whopping 45 percent of rape exoneration cases involve the misidentification of Black men by white women despite the fact that less than 10 percent of reported rapes of white women are committed by black men. In fact, according to a 2004 meta-analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology the concepts of “black” and “crime” were generally interchangeable with one another in terms of how subjects in the study visually perceived black people.
Mainstream white America continues to embrace the manufactured linkage of Blackness, maleness, and brutality. Many of these ideas have been taken up and repackaged in the more recent past under the policies of the so-called “War on Drugs,” “Stop and Frisk,” and the conservative dog-whistle politics of “law and order.”
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During the institution of slavery, the image of Black people, specifically Black males, was of a docile character. The images of buffoonery, blissful ignorance, and juvenile angst were seen as the primary traits of enslaved Blacks. This is characterized in several portrayals of Black males of this time. The use of Blackface – a type of performance that generally used White actors wearing black make-up to portray Black people in stereotypes – became popular in the 19th century. White actors popularized minstrel shows, depicting stereotypes of Black life as foolish, messy, and overall comedic at the expense of Black culture (Lhamon Jr., 2000; Strausbaugh, 2006). In addition, other popular literature and media characterized antebellum enslaved Blacks as content with their place in society. In literature, the character of Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is portrayed as an older Black slave who is faithful and dutiful to his White master. The film Gone with the Wind depicts content slaves, specifically the role of Mammy who even fends off freedmen. Finally, the Disney film Song of the South depicts Uncle Remus as an elderly Black freedman who was satisfied with his place in society, singing the famous happy song, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
These depictions of Blackness as docile and manageable reflected the ability to control the Black body and mind, creating the idea that slavery was the best position for Black people. This status of inferiority is echoed in W.E.B. DuBois’ writing of how Whites viewed freedom as a way to “spoil” and “ruin” Black people (DuBois, 1903). Additionally, according to David Pilgrim:
These portrayals were pragmatic and instrumental. Proponents of slavery created and promoted images of blacks that justified slavery and soothed white consciences. If slaves were childlike, for example, then a paternalistic institution where masters acted as quasi-parents to their slaves was [sic] humane, even morally right. More importantly, slaves were rarely depicted as brutes because that portrayal might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (2012)
However, this image of Blackness ended after the American Civil War. During the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), newly freed Blacks began to obtain social, economic, and political rights with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. This growth was seen in the building of Black communities such as Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was referred to as “Black Wall Street” (Pickens, 2013), the building of schools now known as Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs), and the election of the first two Black U.S. Senators in Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce.
This growth in power challenged White supremacy and created White fear of Black mobility. Particularly, wealthy Whites were fearful of political power newly freed Black people could acquire via voting, whereas poor Whites saw Blacks as competition in the labor force. Thus the rise of the Jim Crow era began, which was solidified by the Supreme Court ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson which stated, “separate but equal is constitutional.” This fear was met with a shift from Black people being viewed as compliant and submissive servants to savages and brute monsters.
Media portrayals of this mythical Black brute began to grow using the same initial science Jefferson and other Enlightenment-era theorists proclaimed, which was based on inaccurate anthropological and biological factors. This time, the argument was that Blacks were naturally more prone to violence and other aggressive behaviors. Charles H. Smith wrote in 1893, “A bad Negro is the most horrible creature upon the earth, the most brutal and merciless” (p. 181). This myth of cruelty and vicious disposition was directed towards White women. As the myth grew and stories spread about the savage Black brute, so did the occurrences of lynching. Lynching – the extrajudicial punishment – was ritualistic and struck fear into Black residents throughout the United States (Litwack, 2004). The most prevalent accusation was the rape or sexual assault of a White woman by a Black male. This allegation would have reverberating effects throughout entire communities. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a young White woman accused a Black male of sexual assault and roughly 300 Black people were killed and more than 9,000 people were left homeless after White mobs destroyed the Greenwood community (Pickens, 2013). Regardless of producing evidence or facts, White mobs would seize Black defendants or attack Black neighborhoods to seek out revenge for this crime.
The case of Sam Hose is an example of how different and various versions of the truth were reported. Hose killed his employer in self-defense after being threatened with a pistol. However newspapers wrote “a monster in human form” emerged, which detailed Hose as cold-blooded, killing his employer, and savagely raping his employer’s wife. The report drove White fear to lynch Hose (Litwack, 2004). In reality, these charges were mere excuses to exercise exorbitant amounts of violence on Black people. The lynching of a Black body became a form of ritualistic violence where limbs and other body parts were taken as souvenirs. Litwack wrote:
After stripping Hose of his clothes and chaining him to a tree, the self-appointed executioners stacked kerosene-soaked wood high around him…they cut off his ears, fingers, and genitals, and skinned his face…the contortions of Sam Hose’s body as the flames rose, distorting his features, causing his eyes to bulge out their sockets…Before Hose’s body had even cooled, his heart and liver were removed and cut into several pieces and his bones were crushed into small particles. The crowd fought over these souvenirs. (p. 123, 2004)
This overkill of the Black body became part of the racist ideology that was used to justify these acts of violence. This mythical act of Black savagery was situated in this idea of Black brutality and criminality that had no other recourse but death. A prominent Georgia woman wrote about the Sam Hose lynching, “The premeditated outrage on Mrs. Cranford was infinitely more intolerable than the murder of her husband” (Litwack, 2004). Hence, uncontrollable desires of Black males were illegal, criminal, and needed to be stopped through the use of physical force. Therefore, this justified vigilante justice in the name of keeping White womanhood pure.
The brute image of Black men became significant moving into the early 20th century, when fear was reinforced with depictions of Black men as harmful. The film Birth of a Nation, made in 1915, shows Black men as savages trying to attack White women. Their brutality is met with propaganda depicting the Ku Klux Klan as heroic and honorable. The result was Blackness becoming closely associated with criminalization. The criminalization of Blackness (Davis, 1998; Alexander, 2010; Muhammad, 2010) allowed for White supremacy to use Black bodies as their scapegoat for all problems, real or fictional. The driving forces behind Black criminality as savage and unmanageable were structurally reinforced by passage of stricter sentencing guidelines in prison and the expansion of the War on Drugs in the second half of the 20th century (Mauer, 2002). These programs and stricter prison guidelines exponentially grew the American prison system by 700% (Pew States, 2007). During this time campaigns for “tough on crime” policy emerged as the soundboard for elected officials. For example, George H.W. Bush’s presidential run used a smear campaign tactic, famously known as the “Willie Horton” ad, where a Black prisoner’s face was used to talk about his heinous crimes and Bush’s opponents’ soft-on-crime policy. While the ad overtly discusses a single Black man, the subliminal and larger take away is Willie Horton’s face became synonymous with all Blackness. In short, the mythical brute became the realistic thug via the process of criminalization.
The image of Black men as brutes in society has a long legacy that begins with the social construction of race and brings us to the current period of mass incarceration. In the United States, Black men are six times as likely to go to jail or prison as White men (Gao, 2013). This disproportionate and unequal number indicates the skewed representation of Black men in U.S. prisons. However, the argument is shifted to no longer being about race but about crime and community safety. This negation of understanding the historical link between “brute” and “thug” marginalizes the significant role race plays.
Lastly, a prime example of how the brute image still thrives in society is the April 2008 Vogue magazine cover of professional basketball player LeBron James holding super model Gisele Bündchen. The image of LeBron giving a menacing look while Gisele is in his arms shares a strikingly eerily similarity to a World War I poster that depicts a gorilla holding a White woman with the title “Destroy this Mad Brute” (Shea, 2008). These types of images that draw on past racial stereotypes and myths reinforce this criminalization, and are now coded with terms such as “thug” today. While historically in America overt racist language was socially acceptable, there has been a cultural shift of social intolerance to this blatant racist behavior. This does not mean that racism or discriminatory actions have been eradicated but rather driven beneath the surface and reemerged as coded language, gestures, signs, and symbols to indicate difference. Terms such as “thug,” “ghetto,” “hood,” “sketchy,” and “shady” are all examples of coded language that are used to refer to or speak of Blackness without overtly sounding racially prejudiced. Fraternities on college campuses throw “Pimps and Hos” parties where stereotypes of Black people as pimps or prostitutes, exemplifying characters from the film Superfly (1972), also lack the language of race but show in physical gesture and imagery the racism encoded in the details.
Over the last several years with the proliferation of social media, many more events are documented and shared via social networking sites (Yar, 2012; Smiley, 2015). Some of these events captured on video are cases involving unarmed Black males being killed by law enforcement agents. While some videos show the disturbing death, such as Eric Garner, others show the aftermath like that of Michael Brown’s body in the street. These deaths and others have sparked outrage across communities looking for justice and accountability of law enforcement’s excessive force when dealing with Black people.
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Wikipedia: Criminal stereotype of African Americans
According to some scholars, the stereotype of African Americans males as criminals was first constructed as a tool to “discipline” and control slaves during the time of slavery in the United States. For instance, Amii Barnard alleges that out of fear of the fugitive slaves staging a rebellion, slaveholders sought to spread the stereotype that African American males were dangerous criminals who would rape the “innocent” and “pure” white women if they had the opportunity to.[13][14] A law introduced in Pennsylvania in 1700 illustrates the fear of a dangerous African American man within the slaveholding society- it mandated that should a black man attempt to rape a White woman, the perpetrator will be castrated or punished to death.[15]
Carter et al. argues that this criminal stereotype contributed to lynching in the United States that mostly targeted African American males in the south.[16] Ida B. Wells, the well-known anti-lynching activist published the pamphlet entitled the “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” from 1892-1920 reporting that contrary to the notion that lynchings occurred because African American males had sexually abused or attacked white women, fewer than 30% of reported lynchings even involved the charge of rape. She also followed up with an editorial that suggested that, most sexual liaisons between black men and white women were consensual and illicit.[17] The criminal stereotype of African Americans as potential rapists at that time is also illustrated in the controversial media portrayal of African American men in the 1915 American epic film, The Birth of a Nation.[18]
According to Marc Mauer however, although African Americans have been consistently stereotyped as “biologically flawed” individuals who have a general tendency towards crime, the depiction of African Americans as criminals became more threatening only in the 1970s and early 1980s- with the evolution of the stereotype of African American males as “petty thieves” to “ominous criminal predators”.[19] In the late 1990s, Melissa Hickman Barlow argued that the perception of African American males as criminals was so entrenched in society that she said “talking about crime is talking about race”.[20] Between 2005 and 2015, the gap in the incarceration rate between blacks and whites declined while still remaining high. The rate of incarceration for blacks declined -2.0% per year, for Hispanics it declined -2.3% per year while for whites it declined only -0.1% per year. Blacks today continue to be incarcerated at a rate over 2.1 times Hispanics and 5.6 times whites.[21] The disparity varies widely by state and region.
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Everyday Feminism: 4 Racist Stereotypes White Patriarchy Invented to ‘Protect’ White Womanhood
The ‘Black Brute’
One of the most long-lasting stereotypes that’s been used to harm Black men is the myth of the “Black Brute.”
Most of the earliest references to this stereotype were created during the late 1800s. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880 – 1917, Gail Bederman explains that this stereotype was used to categorize Black men as inherently violent, uninhibited, and hypersexual. This stereotype, which is very similar to the Black Jezebel trope, was used to dehumanize Black men.
The “Black Brute” stereotype was mainly used as an explanation for why Black people needed to be kept enslaved – namely through perpetuating the idea that that Black men uncontrollably preyed on white women. White men saw themselves as the main line of defense to protect white womanhood and societal power.
As bell hooks explains in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, “[T]he black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon, hypermasculine assertion.”
During Reconstruction and Integration, this stereotype became even more widespread: The myth of the “Black Brute” was often used as a catalyst for lynching and killing Black men throughout the United States.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s work, especially The Red Record, highlights that this stereotype was used to perpetuate mass killings. Emmett Till – a young Black boy who allegedly whistled at a white woman and then was savagely beaten and killed – is one of the most famous examples of this common occurrence.
Unfortunately, the stereotype of the “Black Brute” persists today in the media and in everyday occurrences. And this stereotype has also contributed to physical violence as well.
It was just one year ago that nine Black people were shot and murdered in a Charleston church. The killer explicitly stated that he killed them because “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”
Although this stereotype is over 100 years old, it is still being used today to defend white womanhood. Black men are still seen as animalistic things that are incapable of anything but violence – and thus need to be killed because of it.
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Birth of a Nation
- 1915 D. W. Griffith silent film that portrayed:
- Black reconstruction politicians as incompetent
- Black men (played by black face white actors) as criminals and rapist after white women
- KKK as the savior for white women
- Glorifies lynching and black voter suppression
- Reception
- Credited as inspiring reformation of KKK in 1915
- First movie screened at white house for Wilson
- Supposedly he said, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”
- All 9 Supreme Court justices and many members of Congress attended additional showings
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Further Readings
People School of DC: White Terrorism and Lynching
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Modern Effects of the Black Criminality Myth
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- Police more likely to pull over, arrest and shoot black people
- 60% black people report they/family member have been unfairly treated by police
- Black people compared to white people are:
- 3x as likely to be stopped
- 2x as likely to be arrested
- 4x as likely “to experience the threat or use of force during interactions with the police.”
- Juries are more likely to convict black people
- Black people are 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison than white people
- Judges are more likely to give longer sentences to black people
- Compared to white people, black people are
- 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences
- Likely to receive sentences that are 10% longer once convicted
- Compared to white people, black people are
- Employers are more likely to interview white sounding names on resumes
- Even when job applicants with the same resumes:
- white-sounding names get called back about 50% more than black sounding names
- Even when job applicants with the same resumes:
- Black students are 3x more likely to be suspended than white students
- Even when their infractions are similar
- Black Girls are suspended 6x more than white girls for similar offenses
- Even when their infractions are similar
Sources: 7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real, The New Progressive: The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post, 2017 NPR/Harvard/RWJF
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20/20 ABC News: Children & The Psychology of White Supremacy (2007)
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Racial Bias of Police
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The Economist: Measuring racial bias in police forces
- Young black boys/men, ages 15-19, are 21 times more likely to be to be shot and killed by the police than young white boys/men.
- Blacks are less than 13% of the U.S. population, and yet they are 31% of all fatal police shooting victims, and 39% of those killed by police even though they weren’t attacking.
- A 2007 U.S. Department of Justice report on racial profiling found that blacks and Latinos were 3 times as likely to be stopped as whites, and that blacks were twice as likely to be arrested and 4 times as likely “to experience the threat or use of force during interactions with the police.”
Source: The New Progressive: The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post
Stanford Alumni: A Hard Look at How We See Race
- 2008 Police Experiment (Jennifer Eberhardt)
- Police were subliminally shown black or white faces
- Then asked to identify a blurry image as it came into focus over 41 frames
- On average
- Participants primed w/ black faces could identify weapon 9 frames sooner
- than those primed with white faces could (middle-right)
- Participants primed w/ black faces could identify weapon 9 frames sooner
- Police were subliminally shown black or white faces
Photo: Courtesy Jennifer Eberhardt
In one experiment, subjects were subliminally shown black or white faces, then asked to identify a blurry image as it came into focus over 41 frames. On average, participants primed with black faces could identify a weapon nine frames sooner (middle-left) than those primed with white faces could (middle-right).”
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Open Carry Advocates Challenge Police Bias in Oregon
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Implicit Racial Bias in Court Cases
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- Blacks are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences.
- Blacks are 20% more likely to be sentenced to prison than whites.
- Once convicted, black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes.
Source: The New Progressive: The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post
- A black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person has a better chance of being arrested. Once arrested, black people are convicted more often than white people. And for many years, laws assigned much harsher sentences for using or possessing crack, for example, compared to cocaine. Finally, when black people are convicted, they are more likely to be sent to jail. And their sentences tend to be both harsher and longer than those for whites who were convicted of similar crimes. And as we know, a felony conviction means, in many states, that you lose your right to vote. Right now in America, as many as 13% of black men are not allowed to vote.
Source: 7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real
Further Readings
NY Times: To Curb Bad Verdicts, Court Adds Lesson on Racial Bias for Juries
NBC: Connecticut will be first state to collect prosecutor data to study racial bias
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Racial Bias in Schools
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Black students represent 16% of student enrollment but:
- they make up nearly 50% of suspensions
- three times more likely to be suspended than white students even when their infractions are similar
- black students represent 16% of student enrollment
- black students are half as likely as white students to be assigned to gifted programs, even when they have comparably high test scores
Black Girls are suspended 6x more than white girls for similar offenses
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PUSHOUT: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
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Let Her Learn: A Toolkit to Stop School Push Out For Girls of Color
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Let Her Learn: Join the Fight to Stop School Pushout
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White Adult Stereotypes of Youth of Color
- 2018 Harvard National study of 1022 white adults working or volunteering with youth:
- High levels of negative racial stereotypes toward non-whites of all ages among white adults
- Highest levels of negative attitudes were toward blacks across all stereotypes measured
- Lazy, unintelligent, violent and having unhealthy habits
- Native American, and Hispanic/Latinx seen as similarly negative on several stereotypes
- White adult stereotypes most pronounced toward adults
- But seen even toward young children aged 0-8 years
- Black children were seen less negatively than black adults
- But more negatively than children from other racial groups
- Except for Native American and Hispanic/Latinx
- Young black children aged 0-8 years
- 3x more likely to be rated as being lazy than white adults
- Young black children almost
- 2x as likely to be rated as unintelligent or violence-prone compared with white children of the same age
- Black teenagers and Native Americans almost
- 10x more likely to be considered lazy than white adults
- Black and Hispanic/Latinx teens were between
- 5 to 2x more likely to be considered violence-prone and unintelligent than white adults and white teens
- But more negatively than children from other racial groups
“these findings are highly concerning given the strong scientific evidence that negative racial attitudes are associated with poorer quality care and services and with disparities in health, education and social outcomes. That these negative attitudes have been found toward even young children aged 0-8 among adults who work or volunteer with them has serious potential consequences for these children’s outcomes throughout life.” Lead author Naomi Priest
Source: PLOS: Stereotyping across intersections of race and age: Racial stereotyping among White adults working with children
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Misrepresentation in Media
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Root: Throw Away the Script: How Media Bias Is Killing Black America”
““Biased coverage perpetuates a dangerous cycle, by helping to create and affirm explicit and implicit biases in the minds of audiences,” Robinson tells The Root. “People in everyday situations—personal and professional—then act out those biases, treating black people as if the media’s stereotypes are real.”
If institutionalized racism is the poison, then mainstream media is the hypodermic needle that pushes it deeply into the veins of society, rendering the humanity of black people invisible. And an increased awareness tells us that some media professionals don’t even realize they’re dealers. Relying on a well-worn template that frames black people as thugs and cultural malignancies by default is not news; it is propaganda that serves only to reaffirm for many Americans what they think they know about black people.
And as long as media continues to stick to a script influenced by racial bias, our communities will continue to pay the price.”
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Leigh Donaldson: When the Media Misrepresents Black Men, the Effects are Felt in the Real World
In a 2011 study, Media Representations & Impact on the Lives of Black Men and Boys, conducted by The Opportunity Agenda, negative mass media portrayals were strongly linked with lower life expectations among black men. These portrayals, constantly reinforced in print media, on television, the internet, fiction shows, print advertising and video games, shape public views of and attitudes toward men of color. They not only help create barriers to advancement within our society, but also “make these positions seem natural and inevitable”…
…What we are also seeing play out among both white and black people is a hyped view of black boys and men being coupled with criminality and violence, a lack of empathy for black men and boys in trouble, less attention being paid to the bigger picture of social and economic disparity and increased public support of more rigorous approaches to social ills, such as police aggression and longer jail sentences…
…Media images and words are known, according to the Opportunity Agenda study, to have the greatest impact on the perceptions of people with less real-world experience. People who have never interacted with a black family in their communities more easily embrace what the media tells them. The most negative impact is upon black individuals themselves. Derogatory portrayals can demoralize and reduce self-esteem. In worst case scenarios, black boys and men actually internalize biases and stereotypes and, through their behavior, reinforce and even perpetuate the misrepresentations. They become victims of perception…
…Not only does the media’s reluctance to provide more balanced perspectives of our African-American male population worsen cultural division among all people, it enables judges to hand out harsher sentences, companies to deny jobs, banks to decline loans and the police to shoot indiscriminately.
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Yes! Magazine: 10 Examples That Prove White Privilege Exists in Every Aspect Imaginable
6. I Have the Privilege of Soaking in Media Blatantly Biased Toward My Race
Everyday Feminism writer Maisha Z. Johnson deepened my understanding of this bias that rears its unwelcome, White-loving head, for example, in pictures that humanize White killers while simultaneously dehumanizing victims of Color:
Two sets of pictures, one with and one without mugshots—for the same crime, covered by the same reporter (on the same day)—further illustrate this bias:
And these biases are besides a media that, according to Vanity Fair, continue to be overwhelmingly whitewashed (not to mentioned malewashed, straightwashed, and youthwashed).
If you are still not convinced, check out actor Dylan Marron’s website, Every Single Word, through which the Venezuelan American has edited mainstream movies so that only the characters of color speak. Even the two-hour-and-19 minute-movie, Noah—set in a region filled with Brown people—is reduced to just eleven seconds.
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Misrepresentation in News
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- Black families represent 59% of the poor portrayed
- but account for just 27% of Americans in poverty
- Whites families make up 17% of the poor portrayed
- but make up 66% of the American poor
- Black people represent 37% of criminals shown in the news
- but constitute 26% of those arrested on criminal charges
- White people represent 28% of criminals shown in the news
- But constitute 77% of crime suspects
- Black people 3x more likely portrayed dependent on welfare
- than white people
- Black fathers are shown spending time with their kids
- almost half as often as white fathers
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WP: News media offers consistently warped portrayals of black families, study finds
If all you knew about black families was what national news outlets reported, you are likely to think African Americans are overwhelmingly poor, reliant on welfare, absentee fathers and criminals, despite what government data show, a new study says.
Major media outlets routinely present a distorted picture of black families — portraying them as dependent and dysfunctional — while white families are more likely to be depicted as sources of social stability, according to the report released Wednesday by Color of Change, a racial justice organization, and Family Story, an advocate of diverse family arrangements.
“This leaves people with the opinion that black people are plagued with self-imposed dysfunction that creates family instability and therefore, all their problems,” said Travis L. Dixon, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conducted the study.
Such stereotypes fuel political rhetoric and inform public policy, such as Congress’s consideration to “gut social safety net programs,” he said. Stricter work requirements, drug testing and other welfare restrictions are likely to be supported by a public exposed to inaccurate portrayals of black families, the report said. Legislators can point to media coverage of black families in their zeal to further limit welfare programs and say, “It’s all their fault. They just need to get their ducks in a row,” Dixon said.
Poverty and welfare were not always stigmatized in the media as a predominantly black issue, the report said. White men who benefited from the anti-poverty programs in the 1920s and 1930s were typically thought of as having “run into hard luck” and just needed the support to “help them through the tough times,” it said.
Over time, however, political leaders and the media have “worked to pathologize black families in the American imagination to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, widespread economic inequity and urban disinvestment — as well as to gain and maintain political and social power,” wrote Nicole Rodgers, founder of Family Story.
Researchers reviewed more than 800 local and national news stories and commentary pieces published or aired between January 2015 and December 2016, randomly sampling the most highly rated news programs for each of the major broadcast and cable networks. Those included ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
Also included in the study: newspapers of national influence such as The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune as well as regional newspapers, conservative websites such as Breitbart, and Christian news sources like the Christian Post.
The study concluded both ideologically driven news sources as well as traditional newspapers and broadcasts furthered false narratives about black families, helping to shape public assumptions that they are “uniquely and irrevocably pathological and undeserving,” Dixon said.
Black families represent 59 percent of the poor portrayed in the media, according to the analysis, but account for just 27 percent of Americans in poverty. Whites families make up 17 percent of the poor depicted in news media, but make up 66 percent of the American poor, the study said.
Black people are also nearly three times more likely than whites to be portrayed as dependent on welfare, the study showed. Black fathers were shown spending time with their kids almost half as often as white fathers.
Blacks represent 37 percent of criminals shown in the news, but constitute 26 percent of those arrested on criminal charges, the study said. In contrast, news media portray whites as criminals 28 percent of the time, when FBI crime reports show they make up 77 percent of crime suspects.
“There are dire consequences for black people when these outlandish archetypes rule the day: abusive treatment by police, less attention from doctors, harsher sentences from judges,” Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, wrote in the report.
Dixon said racial tropes of the absentee black father or family dysfunction were frequently invoked during new shows featuring political commentary. Pundits were often allowed to spout inaccurate generalizations about black families without being challenged by hosts.
“Let’s say the actual topic was the Black Lives Matter movement and police citizen interactions,” Dixon said. “This idea of the problematic black family would keep coming up, almost out of nowhere, even if the topic was not about the black family.”
The report makes several recommendations for the news industry, including setting stronger standards for sourcing information and experts, providing greater social and historical context, and including people of color in setting editorial standards.
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Myth of the Absent Black Father
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AJ+: The Myth Of The Absent Black Father
Daily Kos: The absent black father myth—debunked by CDC
We’ve been told, quite frequently and repeatedly that the problems in the black community that we’ve seen in Ferguson and Baltimore recently are not the fault of biased, paramilitary, paranoid and violent policing (even if the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that black people are three times more likely to be subject to law enforcement uses of force). They are not the fault of racist red-lining that created these impoverished neighborhoods in the first place. They are not the fault of bigoted lending and hiring practices that create roadblocks for those attempting to escape those neighborhoods. And the fact that black students are disciplined, suspended and expelled far more easily and quickly for the same or lesser offenses, isn’t the problem. None of that is the problem. Nope. All of that is just too bad. Life is tough all over. Lots of people have got lots of problems. No, instead we’ve heard that the welfare benefits in Baltimore are “too lucrative,” because when you give people nothing they somehow get more, somewhere. That businesses won’t invest in these neighborhoods until something is done about those darn teachers unions. That it’s because of “too many gay marriages.” That ISIS is using Baltimore to recruit blacks. And, of course, when all else fails, blame Obama. But what we’ve heard the most, is that the real problem is the Breakdown in the Black Family™. That too many black fathers have abandoned their children, allowing them to be raised by the streets like feral cats. They don’t learn morals, and they don’t learn values—so naturally police have to shoot them down like rabid, foaming dogs. Even when they’re unarmed. Even when they have their backs turned and are simply running away. It’s all just their own fault really. If only black fathers would spend as much time and energy on their kids as white fathers do. If only… Well, someone—the Centers for Disease Control—actually went to trouble of checking just how involved in their lives all fathers are, whether or not they are married to the mother of their children or live with them. What they found was that, in reality, black fathers are actually more attentive to their children than other fathers generally are.
Imagine that? Details over the flip.
Some of the relevant highlights from the CDC study as posted at Think Progress.
Considering the fact that “black fatherhood” is a phrase that is almost always accompanied by the word “crisis” in U.S. society, it’s understandable that the CDC’s results seem innovative. But in reality, the new data builds upon years of research that’s concluded that hands-on parenting is similar among dads of all races. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to bust this racially-biased myth. […] Although black fathers are more likely to live separately from their children—the statistic that’s usually trotted out to prove the parenting “crisis”—many of them remain just as involved in their kids’ lives. Pew estimates that 67 percent of black dads who don’t live with their kids see them at least once a month, compared to 59 percent of white dads and just 32 percent of Hispanic dads. And there’s compelling evidence that number of black dads living apart from their kids stems from structural systems of inequality and poverty, not the unfounded assumption that African-American men somehow place less value on parenting. Equal numbers of black dads and white dads tend to agree that it’s important to be a father who provides emotional support, discipline, and moral guidance. There’s one area of divergence in the way the two groups approach their parental responsibilities: Black dads are even more likely to think it’s important to financially provide for their children.
So, of course, parents should be involved in the lives of their children. Of course they should help guide them, give them a sense of morality, goals and direction. But that doesn’t require that the father necessarily be married to the mother. People like Donald Trump have certainly made that obvious. The nuclear family myth has long ago been blown into small dust-like bits. Many of us live in extended and blended house-holds within which we’ve all learned to adapt, and function and even thrive. Perhaps it’s time we stopped flogging the simplistic notion that all that truly plagues the black community is a lack of weddings. 12:03 PM PT: To be fair and complete, as pointed out in the comments, there is a significant difference in the rate of single-parent families across racial lines as this chart from the KidCount Datacenter shows here:

However this is actually the rate of marriages across racial groups and not a direction correlation to the percentage of those who are living with, or living apart from their children as noted in the CDC report.
Definitions: Children under age 18 who live with their own single parent either in a family or subfamily.
In this definition, single-parent families may include cohabiting couples and do not include children living with married stepparents. Children who live in group quarters (for example, institutions, dormitories, or group homes) are not included in this calculation.
This really is a difference in the rate of marriages, so it is isn’t really a perfect correlation for those living with, or apart, from their children. Here’s a couple snap shots from the Census Bureau on Children Living with a single or both parents regardless of marriage.


These do show a difference in the percentage of children living with one parent (the mother only) vs two parents between White (18%), Latino or Hispanic (24%) and Black (50%) households. But what’s interesting is the percentage who live with their father only (White – 3.8%, Hispanic – 3.0%, Black – 4.3%) which is also higher. Does this invalidate the CDC analysis? Well, no. There is a lower marriage rate among black people and that does seem to have an effect on how many of them are living with vs living apart from their children. But the level of involvement, of parenting, across racial lines from men in either of those two living situations – is not that significantly different. In fact, more Black fathers who live apart from their children in most measurements are actually far more involved in their children’s lives [in some cases by nearly a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio] which may be a direct result, and/or offset, to the fact that far more of them are in that situation percentage-wise.
5:11 PM PT: Couple more thoughts:
One of the problems with the assumption that a Nuclear Family is the “best” family for raising children is the reality that not all biological parents provide the best guidance, example, or have the best of relationship with each other. Things can turn abusive, violent and sometimes deadly. Quite often the weapons used in this disputes, is a gun.
Firearms were used to kill more than two-thirds of spouse and ex-spouse homicide victims between 1990 and 2005.2
Domestic violence assaults involving a firearm are 12 times more likely to result in death than those involving other weapons or bodily force.3
Abused women are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if the abuser owns a firearm.4A recent survey of female domestic violence shelter residents in California found that more than one third (36.7%) reported having been threatened or harmed with a firearm.5 In nearly two thirds (64.5%) of the households that contained a firearm, the intimate partner had used the firearm against the victim, usually threatening to shoot or kill the victim.6
So that’s one reason why some moms and dads shouldn’t live together.
Another factor on the “Nuclear Family” ideas is the fact that many of these studies don’t take into account the impact of the extended family, grand-parents, uncles, aunts, older siblings and cousins can have on the child-rearing processes. Parenting sometimes takes more than just the actual parents themselves, particular when both of them need to work to make end-meet, and there are other day-care and babysitting issues that need to be addressed. Two out of our last three serving Presidents were raised in single-parent homes with the support of extended family, so clearly – it’s not hopeless.
Lastly it strikes me that there can be inherent problems at looking at an internal proportional number, when the external proportion may be at an far larger differential. To wit: there are almost five times as many White people in America as they are Black. So if you were to take the single-parent percentages for each and multiply them against the numbers of actual children involved what you would see is this:
Hispanic Children in Single-Parent Households: 28.6% x 16.3 Million = 4.66 Million
Black Children in Single-Parent Households: 54.7% x 11.2 Million = 6.12 Million.
[Corrected] White Children in Single-Parent Households: 22.1% x 55.9 Million = 12.3 Million.
So even with an almost twice as high internal percentage of single-parent households, the external percentage is that there are still only one third one half as many black children living in that situation as there are white, and when you add this greater quantity of white “at risk” youth to the CDC data it seems that the quality of some of that white parenting may not be quite a strong.
But we don’t really hear much about the single-parenting crisis of absent White Fathers, now do we? And we don’t see our jails filled to the brim with the failed results of these millions of white single-parent households even with a 2:1 gap in actual numbers, instead we see it filled far more frequently, with black men who afterward can’t really be good, attentive Fathers anymore, now can they? And perhaps that, excessive incarceration, is the source for the internal percentage differential in the first place.
Wed May 13, 2015 at 1:26 PM PT: I’ve gotten some pushback on twitter claiming I have failed to “debunk” the Black Father Myth. Well, part of the point of a myth is that it itself isn’t really “proven” in the first place. For example even some of the links provided by naysayers in the comments don’t necessary make that case when describing the better outcomes that are typically associated with the children of married couples.
Is it simply because they have, on average, higher family incomes? (Two earners are better than one, and one household is cheaper to run than two.) Or are two committed spouses better able to provide consistent parenting? Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?
It is usually using the disparity in marriage rates among the races that people usually draw the conclusion that there is a “crisis” in black families, and that their is a deficit in black fathers. Those numbers as I previously showed in my first update are as follows:
White Single Families: 25% Hispanic Single Families: 42% Black Single Families: 67%
People usually look at these numbers alone and go “Aha, there’s your problem“, but I think this is a gross oversimplification of far more complex real life situations. I showed this in the second part of that update when I noted that not being married doesn’t really mean that the parent is “absent” as a good percentage of families may live together but remain unmarried.
Single Parent Living Arrangements White 22.1% Hispanic 28.6% Black 54.7%
So as you can see although the figures don’t change much from married White couples with children to cohabiting but unmarried parents, it drops 14% for Hispanics and 13% for Blacks. Another issue I addressed in the 2nd update which is rarely addressed by those who fault marriages alone as being the big problem with Black child-rearing is the issue of blended families. There are many cases which the married/unmarried statistic fail to address when the mother may not be living with or married to the father, but is instead living with and/or married to someone else.
There are no recent estimates on the percentage of children residing in blended families.
These statistics underestimate the number of U.S. blended families, because…
To date, government reporting of population figures indicate families in which the child resides. So if the child lives with a divorced, single parent and the other nonresident parent has remarried, the child is not included in the calculations as being a member of a blended family.Estimates suggest that many children living in a “single parent household” (as designated by the Census Bureau) are actually living with two adults. Thus, their best estimates indicate that about 25% of current blended families are actually cohabiting couples.
40% of married couples with children (i.e., families) in the US are stepcouples (at least one partner had a child from a previous relationship before marriage; this includes full and part-time residential stepfamilies and those with children under and/or over the age of 18). The percentage of all married couple households is 35%. (Karney, Garvan, & Thomas, 2003)
All of this means that the census bureau’s data of “living arrangements” can be off by as much as 25% when dealing with blended families situations and even their much lower figures of Hispanic and Black single parent living arrangements could in fact be far, far lower than shown.
So the bottom line issue, once we get back to the CDC figures on how much fathers across the various races actually do the real working of parenting rather than just being nearby or within the same house – can we definitively say that qualitative difference proportionally overwhelms the quantitative [but grossly incomplete] data that proponents of the “Black Fathers Suck” faction seem to espouse?
I don’t know.
Frankly, because the data is incomplete and there isn’t as far as I can tell a breakdown of blended families by race, I honestly can’t tell. And that’s why I didn’t get into this subject in more detail earlier, it’s a wash. But the incompleteness of the data also shows that absent Black Fathers Myth, isn’t proven either. In fact without full, complete, and accurate numbers – it can’t be proven.
However, what the CDC info does show is that pound for pound, on a family by family average basis Black fathers are generally more attentive to their children whether the live with them or apart from them, and even using the Census Bureau numbers there are far more White Children “at risk” from their less attentive and absent fathers than there are Black. Shouldn’t that be the larger concern if missing fathers truly are the “crisis” some people claim it is?
Vox: Debunking the most pervasive myth about black fatherhood
There’s a very pervasive myth about black fathers: that they’re more often than not absent from their children’s lives. But if you look at the data, it turns out the truth is far more complicated than the ugly stereotype suggests.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow previously took on this myth. Blow started with the basis for much of the idea: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that showed 71.5 percent of black, non-Hispanic children in 2013 were born to unmarried women, compared with 29.3 percent of white, non-Hispanic children.
But as Josh Levs pointed out in his new book All In, 2.5 million of 4.2 million black fathers — or about 59.5 percent — live with their children. Levs’s numbers suggest that it’s not true, as the CDC figures suggests, that 71.5 percent of black dads are absent from their homes — but rather that many of them are simply unmarried.
And when black fathers do live with their children, they’re just as, if not more, likely to be involved in their kids’ everyday lives. Blow cited CDC data that showed black fathers are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to feed, eat with, bathe, diaper, dress, play with, and read to their children on a daily basis. While some of the differences in the data aren’t statistically significant, the figures indicate that black dads are at least as likely to remain involved in their children’s lives as those of other races
Still, the same CDC data shows black men are nearly three times as likely as white men to have at least one child they don’t live with — but Blow pointed to policy-driven issues that may be driving the disparity. For example, a previous report by Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy for the New York Times found there are 100 black women not in jail or prison for every 83 non-incarcerated black men. So mass incarceration has actually drained 1.5 million black men — many of whom are young and of marrying age — from their communities, making it more difficult for black women to find committed partners of the same race.
All of the data paints a more nuanced view of black fatherhood than the stereotypes suggest. It’s not an issue of laziness, inability to commit to family, or another inherent flaw in black culture, as some people may suggest. There are real systemic issues at play — and most black fathers do seem to be trying make the future bright for their kids.
Further Reading
NY Times: The dangerous myth of the ‘missing black father’
Miami Herald: Don’t believe the ‘absent’ myth. Black fathers are present and accounted for in their kids’ lives.
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Black vs White Criminals Representation
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Victim Blaming/Character Assassination
- Myth that victims caused their death
- By “not getting out of a car”, “acting a certain way”, “looking a certain way”, “He would be alive if only he…”
- “Dear world, black people do not want to exit our vehicles in cop-related incidents because we’ve seen that end in murder too many times.” Solange
- In wake of a police shooting, there’s a need rationalize police violence usually by demonizing the victim
- Through the leak of public records, unflattering personal details, routine run-ins with the law
- “Police Departments have millions in PR budgets, while the victim’s families are almost always poor and unschooled in press manipulation. The state has records on the victim, and yet the family is barred in most states from even knowing their son or daughter’s killer. The deck, to put it mildly, is stacked in favor of the powerful — rendering appeals to objectivity hollow.” Adam Johnson – AlterNet
- Examples:
- Michael Brown – after being killed by a policeman media highlighted his previously run-ins with the law and claimed he was “no angel”
- Eric Garner – after police used an illegal chokehold on camera to kill Eric who was not resisting
- media smeared him as a “career criminal” who somehow caused his own death by resisting arrest
- Sandra Bland – after illegal arrest, harassment, and outright neglect led to Sandra Bland’s death
- media reported she had “marijuana in the system.”
- Sam Dubose – His car propelled forward after being killed by a police officer. Media claimed he was resisting arrest
- Charly “Africa” Keunang – homeless man killed by police in borad daylight with many witnesses and a recording
- The police leaked his criminal record to the press to smear him.
- Freddie Gray – Died from injuries including a spinal injury caused by police.
- Police told lies that he caused his own death to criminalized cops and discredit protestors
- Botham Jean – after a cop wrongly entered and killed Botham, police got search warrant to find things to use against him.
- They found marijuana.
- “in an effort to justify police killings under the guise of “balance” the media rushes to find anything — no matter how common or innocuous — to criminalize the victim. And, since roughly 1 in 9 Americans smokes cannabis regularly, an easy go-to is the “weed in the system” line.” Adam Johnson – Alternet
“In America, accused individuals are innocent until proven guilty. Too often, in police-involved shootings, not only are officers presumed innocent, their victims are presumed guilty.” Daily News Editorial Board
“smears again police victims are more about managing public outrage than they are about truth. They’re about playing to racist tropes and criminalizing victims so the power establishment — largely white and wealthy — will side with the killer, not the killed. They’re about justifying state violence either because of ideology or credulity. They’re, above all, about erasing black suffering from the national conversation and turning victims into criminals and criminal cops into heroes.” Adam Johnson – Alternet
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Altnet: 5 Times the Media Has Smeared Black Victims of Police Killings Since Michael Brown
Mike Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson exactly one year ago Sunday. His death not only sparked a nationwide movement against police violence generally known as #BlackLivesMatter, it also provided the script which all of the frequent subsequent police shootings of unarmed black men and women have played out in the media.
From the beginning, the media was quick to contextualize Brown’s shooting by finding unflattering personal details about his life including routine run-ins with the law. The most shameless case was the now infamous August 25th profile in the The New York Times that insisted “Mike Brown was no angel” as if anyone had argued otherwise about him, or another human being on earth. It was a piece that feigned nuance, but was really a part of a weeks-long posthumous trial of the dead teenager. For Brown, and countless black victims like him, they were as much, if not more, on trial than the person who had done the actual killing. They were being tried posthumously and without PR counsel.
In the wake of a police shooting, the need to rationalize police violence — typically under the guise of “balance” — almost always means demonizing the victim through public records requests, government leaks, and selective interviews. When one adopts a “both sides” mentality for police shootings, based on the nature of murder, one person cannot speak for themselves, invariably leaving us with one perspective: that of the police.
Police Departments have millions in PR budgets, while the victim’s families are almost always poor and unschooled in press manipulation. The state has records on the victim, and yet the family is barred in most states from even knowing their son or daughter’s killer. The deck, to put it mildly, is stacked in favor of the powerful — rendering appeals to objectivity hollow. Howard Zinn famously said, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” This has never been more obvious that in the dozens of cases of African-Americans killed by police over the past year, almost all of whom found themselves being tried in absentia by a press which prioritizes “objectivity” over fairness and access over justice.
Here are the five worst examples of demonization of black victims of police violence since Mike Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer on August 9th 2014:
Blame only the man who tragically decided to resist
Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions.
Epically bad decisions.
Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police. And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law. The law won, of course, as it almost always does.
There it is. Because Mr. Garner was a “career criminal” who, for once, resisted arrest in the most benign way possible, he deserved to die. No account of whether such extreme force was needed. No account for the banned chokehold, no account for whether or not six white men jumping on top of one black man was, at all, racially charged. No, in authoritarian rightwing land, anything short of complete submission to the police is punishable by death. And, because to them black life is cheap, their deaths become a morality tale for other black people to follow — obey the police or suffer the same fate. In this sense, black deaths aren’t just ignored, they are used as a warning to others.
1. Eric Garner
Choked on camera in broad daylight for “resisting arrest” with his hands up, Eric Garner’s death was one of the few cop killings that was so egregious it resulted in relatively bipartisan outrage – including, strangely enough, from former President George W. Bush. who said the decision not to indict Eric Garner’s killer Daniel Pantaleo was “hard to understand.”
But it’s important to stress the word “relatively” because rightwing trolls wouldn’t have it. Outlets from Breitbart, to Fox News to The New York Post to NewsMax dedicated considerable time to smearing Eric Garner as a “career criminal” who somehow caused his own death by resisting arrest. Vulgar human Bob McManus would pen one of the more offensive mainstream Garner smears, the day after his killer was set free by a Staten Island Grand Jury:
2. Sandra Bland
A combination of a likely illegal arrest, harassment, and outright neglect led to Sandra Bland’s death last month. Whether or not that was by way of suicide is yet to be determined, but thus far it seems she took her own life. In many ways, as other commenters have noted, it doesn’t matter. And in many ways, the media treated it no differently. In the wake of Ms. Bland’s death, aside from the aforementioned and entirely predictable authority worship from Fox News, another common smear tactic was trotted out: “marijuana in the system.”
It’s a popular line and one the media and St. Louis County authorities echoed time and time again in the wake of Mr. Brown’s death. That somehow having cannabis in one’s system is either relevant or inculpatory. As Managing Director of the Drug Policy Alliance Sharda Sekaran noted in the Huffington Post:
At a news conference discussing the preliminary findings of an autopsy following Bland’s alleged suicide at the Waller County Jail in Texas last week, officials placed heavy emphasis on marijuana reported to be found in the young woman’s system.
Why this emphasis? What does this have to do with widespread demands for accountability around the circumstances of her death? Are we expected to believe the not so subtle insinuation that marijuana use played a part? How is this still happening? Take a sample of random people in any walk of life in this country at any given moment in time, and you are likely to find marijuana in the system of many of them.
The reason for the emphasis is clear: in an effort to justify police killings under the guise of “balance” the media rushes to find anything — no matter how common or innocuous — to criminalize the victim. And, since roughly 1 in 9 Americans smokes cannabis regularly, an easy go-to is the “weed in the system” line.
3. Sam Dubose
Even after Hamilton County’s right-wing prosecutor delivered what has to be one of the most clear condemnations of a killer cop ever, Fox News couldn’t help itself, trying to muddy the waters soon after by, once again, blaming the victim.
As Media Matters noted at the time, Eric Bolling of Fox News’s The Five would repeat the ol’ “Don’t resist arrest line” because, as we all know, the punishment for resisting arrest is summary execution:
But everyone is rushing this, prosecutor just said the cop is guilty of murder. He’s already indicted him. And I’m not defending this at all. But people have to realize you can’t resist arrest. This guy is taking off. I don’t think that cop was fearing for his life. So I think he’ll probably be found guilty or something, but stop resisting.
Another Fox News contributor and former NYPD detective, Bo Dietl wouldn’t miss a beat, telling Sean Hannity later than night, “Listen to me. I said it doesn’t outweigh the shooting. But should he have just driven away from the cop? Eric, is that right for him to just drive away from the cop? That’s not right either.“
Body camera footage from the incident seems to contradict the claim that Dubose fled from the officer. The footage seems to suggest that, in contrast to what the officer claimed, Dubose’s car propeled forward after he was shot.
The impulse for the media, especially the right-wing media, to blame black victims for their own deaths is so strong, that even in the face of official Republican condemnation the bottom feeders at Fox News will still apologize for the police’s actions. Even when video is released that shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, a white police officer wrongfully killed a black man, the impulse to blame the victim cannot be contained. It’s not just bias, it’s a pathology.
4. Charly “Africa” Keunang
One of the lesser known police killings is also one of the more egregious examples of the media taking it upon themselves to smear a black victim. A video showing an unarmed homeless man being shot in broad daylight quickly went viral on March 1st, resulting in the LAPD going on the defensive. Per usual, the entirely unrelated criminal record of Keunang, who friends called “Africa,” would be leaked to the press and shamelessly repeated even thougt they had no bearing on the case whatsoever.
One reporter, in particular, Kate Mather of the Los Angels Times would feel the need to time and time again bring up a bank robbery Mr. Africa had committed over fifteen years ago. As I wrote at the time for FAIR:
This arrangement would become even sleazier yesterday when city authorities–and thus the LA Times–went into full on character assassination mode, with back-to-back smear pieces about Africa’s totally irrelevant criminal past. This screencap of the LA Times‘ Kate Mather’s bio page sums it up nicely:
Her jolly face contrasted with the scary, entirely non sequitur mugshot of Africa raises the question: Why? What does whether he robbed a bank 15 years ago have to do with anything? How is it relevant? How can it do anything but serve to posthumously try and convict him on unrelated charges of being poor and mentally ill?
This case illustrates an important point as well: the smearing of black victims isn’t just a staple of the rightwing media, it’s a very routine practice in local and corporate media who are in desperate need of information and always willing to uncritically repeat whatever the local police departments hand them inexchange for it. Which brings us to the last and most well-known smear:
5. Freddie Gray
The death of Freddie Gray was ruled a homicide and the officers involved were eventually arrested and charged with a number of crimes, including murder and manslaughter. But not after a week of smear pieces coming from anonymous police sources that attempted to blame Mr. Gray for his own death. Indeed, much of what the Baltimore Police said during the week of unrest in late April turned out to be bogus, including a “gang conspiracy” to take out cops that was uncritically repeated by the media but later revealed to be false by the FBI.
In addition to telling lies to discredit protestors, the Baltimore Police Department was content telling lies that also discredited the source of their outrage: Freddie Gray. Two days before prosecutors would indict the cops who were responsible for Gray’s death, the Washinton Post would run a rather bizarre — and ultimately discredited — piece based on anonymous BPD leaks detailing how Freddie Gray was trying to injure himself the day of his arrest:
A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,”according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.
Eventually, follow up corrections to the piece as well as the DA’s indictment would go a long way to discrediting the idea that Gray was supposedly responsible for his own death but in many ways the damage was done.
Like smears against protestors that almost always turn out to be bogus, smears again police victims are more about managing public outrage than they are about truth. They’re about playing to racist tropes and criminalizing victims so the power establishment — largely white and wealthy — will side with the killer, not the killed. They’re about justifying state violence either because of ideology or credulity. They’re, above all, about erasing black suffering from the national conversation and turning victims into criminals and criminal cops into heroes.
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Francis Maxwell: How The Media Covers White Terrorists vs BLACK Victims
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- Show White People’s Accomplishments
- And People of Color’s Alleged Crimes
- Choose Charming Photos of White Victims
- And ‘Incriminating’ Photos of Victims of Color
- Empathize With Motivation for White Person’s Violence
- And Demonize People of Color’s Motivations
- Emphasize That a Hateful White Person Acted Alone
- While Casting People of Color as Stereotypes of Their Race
- Humanize the ‘Troubled’ Lives of White Suspects
- Dehumanize People of Color Suspects and Victims
- Use Innocence and Youth to Humanize White Suspects
- And Treat Young Victims of Color as Older and Guilty
- They Discredit Justice Movements for People of Color
- And Give Rioting White People a Pass
- They Put Victims of Color at Fault
- And White Suspects in Self-Defense Mode
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Everyday Feminism: 8 Ways the Media Upholds White Privilege and Demonizes People of Color

Are you paying attention to how the media gives you information?
Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who had spoken out against police violence, died in police custody on July 13 after a routine traffic stop.
Local authorities ruled her death a suicide.
The people who knew Bland are skeptical of that version of events, and a newly released video showing a Texas state trooper aggressively arresting her has cast widespread doubt. We don’t know the details, but some of the relevant information was already filled in before Bland’s death.
Like the fact that the county where Bland died has a vicious history of racism that includes the district attorney’s office and the standing sheriff, who was fired from his previous post for racism.
Like the statistics that show how police target people of color for stops, arrests, and incarceration, and are far more likely to use force against them.
Like the fact that Bland was a Black woman living in a country, state, and county where racist violence has been weaved into everyday life since the day Bland was born, and for centuries before that.
But one media outlet chose to frame the narrative this way: “Woman Found Dead in Jail Cell Had Prior Run-Ins With Law.”
It’s true – Sandra Bland had been pulled over like this before. Several of those “run-ins” were citations for unpaid traffic tickets. Her last encounter with police was the fatal one, but like other people of color who are targets, it wasn’t the only one.
If you weren’t paying attention, you might think a dangerous hardened criminal – not the real Sandra Bland – had just died in jail.
Were you paying attention when the media told you about last month’s racist mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina?
On June 17th, a white man seeking to kill Black people walked into Emanuel AME Church, sat through Bible Study with the congregants, and then massacred all of them but one. He stole nine innocent lives.
While the mainstream media that so many of us consume covered that much, it didn’t have a complete analysis of why this happened – and that’s not enough.
Dylann Roof acted on his belief in white supremacy. And on inspiration from George Zimmerman, the man who was acquitted for killing unarmed Black teenager Travyon Martin. And further on complicit support from friends who did nothing when they heard him tell racist jokes and talk about starting a “race war.”
He acted on the anti-Black hatred and fear generated from stereotypes of Black people as sexual predators. On strategies of white supremacist groups active in the US today – strategies that have continued with arson attacks on multiple Black churches since the massacre.
He acted on biases that the media perpetuates every day.
This was a mass murder supported by a white supremacist system that intersects with our daily lives. Unfortunately, he’s not the last to violently lash out with this support.
So after incidents like the attacks against the Charleston congregants and Sandra Bland, we need to pay attention to how the media participates in this dangerous system, and demand some crucial changes.
To have any hope of preventing and healing from this type of horrendous violence, we have to deliberately and ferociously take on the racism that prevails in our country to allow this to happen.
But the way we get our information about tragedies like this one skews our beliefs about what happened, why, and what we should do about it.
Most of us get information from the mainstream media – which blatantly feeds us a biased distortion of the truth, with the wrong information, favoritism toward white people (whether they’re murderers or not), and the demonization of people of color (whether they’re victims or not).
If you think of the news as simply reporting what you need to know, then you’re missing the fact that it’s reinforcing a basic idea of white supremacy: that white people are more valuable than people of color.
It’s just like other instances of racism – sometimes it’s obvious and you can easily point out that it’s wrong. But a lot of the time, it’s subtle, playing right into the implicit biases you don’t even know you have to make you believe in ideas you don’t even realize are racist.
It’s a disgusting manipulation of the public that lets everyday racism go unchecked.
So instead of buying into the media’s biases as people of color lose their lives to racist violence, let’s pay attention to the following examples of how the media upholds white privilege.
1. They Show White People’s Accomplishments – And People of Color’s Alleged Crimes
We rely on the media to provide the details of who suspects and victims are.

This CBS News story on theater shooter James Holmes described his academic achievements and polite manners – a “typical American boy.”
Regardless of what defines someone’s story if they make it on the news – whether they’ve committed a heinous act or fallen victim to violence – we’re all dynamic human beings made up of more than a single incident. We’ve all had accomplishments and made mistakes.
So the media chooses which parts of our lives to show – and their choices often humanize white people while villifying people of color.
For instance, young white men responsible for horrible mass shootings are often given the “brilliant loner” treatment. Headlines describing killers like Adam Lanza and James Holmes as “smart,” “quiet,” and “nice” are common.
On the other hand, when young people of color are the victims of violence, they still rarely get their accomplishments named in the mainstream media.
In McKinney, Texas, white neighbors yelled racial slurs and physically assaulted a group of youth of color at a pool party – and things got even worse when a police officer called to the scene wrestled unarmed Black teenager Dejerria Becton to the ground, pulled a gun on her friends, and sat on her to restrain her.
So when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly talked about that horrible incident, she could’ve researched Dejerria Becton’s achievements. She could’ve focused on the fact that Dejerria was an innocent party who was invited to the honorable act of celebrating a friend’s graduation, AND who was following the officer’s instructions before he attacked her.
Instead, Kelly said that the girl was “no saint,” so rather than seeing her as an innocent victim of violence, viewers can believe that this young girl had it coming.
2. They Choose Charming Photos of White Victims – And ‘Incriminating’ Photos of Victims of Color
This makes the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown so powerful. It’s sad that some people have taken it to another level. pic.twitter.com/oZnLDRRDhN
— SUPERSAYIANGOAT (@SvmmieArnold) August 11, 2014
In addition to words, the media’s images have a huge influence on how we view people.
And once again, the media makes a choice – because we’ve all taken pictures that make us look impressive, and we’ve taken ones that people could use to make us look like we were up to no good.
When Twitter users started trending the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, they highlighted how much the media makes different choices depending on race.
When white victims lose their lives, the media shows graduation pictures, family photos, positive images of the life lost.
They even often use such images for white suspects and murderers, giving us a sense of who they were before things went terribly wrong. Theater shooter James Holmes was shown in a smiling senior photo wearing a suit and tie below a headline calling him “a brilliant science student.”
When mainstream media outlets broke the story of Michael Brown’s slaying at the hands of the police, they could have used photographs from his recent high school graduation. Instead, many of them chose an image that showed him towering over the camera, holding his hand in what some people on social media interpreted as a gang sign.
Clearly, this media representation sways the conversation about whether or not the police were justified in killing the unarmed teenager. A one-dimensional representation of a victim as a criminal makes us more likely to believe that the killers’ actions were necessary.
3. They Empathize With the ‘Motivation’ for a White Person’s Violence
This is the problem with the American media. Stay woke. pic.twitter.com/q1uWgcocLV — Rashad Alaiyan (@rashadalaiyan) June 21, 2015
Ever heard someone say “Wait until we get all the facts” before deciding how to judge a violence incident?
When we get these “facts” from the mainstream media, they encourage us to hold off judgment until we know what’s “really” going on.
And sometimes, even in cases of blatant racially biased violence, their narrative about what’s going on is based on empathy for the white perpetrator’s “motivations.”
For example, in the case of Dylann Roof, who killed those nine church-goers in Charleston for no reason other than that they are Black, some reporters said “we don’t know why he did it.” Others called it “an attack on religious freedom.”
Clearly, their hesitation to state the obvious influenced some people, who accused leaders speaking out about the racism – rather than the mass murderer who wanted to “start a race war” – of being the ones “making everything about race.”
If the media is so concerned about people’s motivations, you’d think they would’ve focused on what drove a Black man named Jim Jones to sacrifice his life by shielding his mother from bullets.
Instead, they called Jones a “son with a troubled past,” as Twitter user Rashad Alaiyan pointed out when he placed that headline side-by-side with one that described Dylann Roof as a “loner” who was “caught in ‘Internet evil.’”
This empathy for white attackers has the dangerous effect of encouraging us to look away from what’s really going on, and focus instead on the well-being of the person who committed a horrible act.
4. They Emphasize That a ‘Hateful’ White Person Acted Alone – While Casting People of Color as Stereotypes of Their Race
I’m not saying the media always shows empathy for white offenders.

In the US since 9/11, terrorist attacks by anti-government, racist, and other nonjihadist extremists have killed nearly twice as many people as those by jihadist extremists. Graphic: NY Times
There have been times when the mainstream media rightfully characterizes a white murderer as a person who did something terrible, showing empathy for the victims, regardless of their killer’s motivations.
But it’s also telling that in these cases, white offenders are often characterized as a “lone wolf,” someone who acted alone on their own hate.
Media outlets included descriptions of white supremacist Larry Steve McQuilliams, who thankfully killed no one in his Texas shooting rampage, as a lone wolf.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, 74% of domestic terrorist acts planned or carried out were the work of people working alone, with just one or two people behind 90% of them.
Violent racist extremists like McQuilliams fall into those categories, but the mainstream media rarely calls them “terrorists.” That word is usually reserved for mass murderers identified as Muslim extremists – especially those who are Arab.
This, in spite of the fact that people like white supremacists have killed almost twice as many people in the US as Muslim extremists who represent “terrorism” to so many Americans.
The media’s framing of terrorism often spreads Islamophobic ideas, perpetuating stereotypes that put the safety of Arab Americans – and anyone who’s seen to fit the erroneous stereotypes – at risk.
As we’ve seen since 9/11, when the media conflates Islam with terrorism, incidents of Islamophobic violence against innocent people rise.
Unlike with white suspects indoctrinated by violent white supremacist ideology, the mainstream media doesn’t mull over “why he did it” if a suspect is an Arab man. And they don’t even write him off as an evil lone wolf.
The media upholds the white privilege of not having the most violent people of your race appear as a stereotype of you.
And what a difference that makes – if white people who commit racist violence are just lone wolves, that means we don’t have to recognize the fact that they’re following a legacy embedded in our country’s violent history.
We don’t have to face the whole system of white supremacy, or be accountable for the fact that it’s not just the violent lone wolves who participate – it’s also everyday people with good intentions, like you and me.
5. They Humanize the ‘Troubled’ Lives of White Suspects
In addition to considering motivation, the media also humanizes white suspects by focusing on their struggles.

Caption: This headline from the LA Times was one of many humanizing Elliot Rodger by focusing on his mental health
Details mentioned far more often for white suspects than suspects of color include if they were “bullied,” or “kept to themselves,” or “had a hard home life.”
Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger is one of many mass murderers whose mental health was the also focus of a lot of media coverage. Rodger, who is half white and half Malaysian Chinese, benefits from white privilege and this is an example of how.
Calling white male suspects “mentally ill” instead of examining other factors is a pattern in the media, and it does twice the injustice: shifting the blame away from the person who chose to commit violent acts, and reinforcing stigma about people with mental illness.
Having a mental illness doesn’t mean someone’s predisposed to violence. So framing the story this way is a harmful distraction and a benefit given only to white suspects.
When the suspect is a person of color, the media often uncovers criminal records, not medical records.
And once again, even victims of color don’t get the humanizing efforts to detail the causes of the troubling aspects of their backgrounds.
With so many poor people of color losing their lives to police violence, for instance, then why doesn’t the mainstream media talk about their struggles that lead to fatal encounters with police?
For example, Freddie Gray, who died in Baltimore police custody, grew up as one of thousands of low-income African-Americans exposed to deadly chemicals in an inner city home.
His family won a settlement after arguing that the lead poisoning he and his sister got “played a significant part in their educational, behavioral, and medical problems.”
Add up the traumatic effect of poverty and mass incarceration in poor Black neighborhoods with the experience of growing up as a Black male targeted by police, and you can understand why we need to address the deadly risk of criminalizing poor people of color. But that’s not what the mainstream media talks about.
6. They Use Innocence and Youth to Humanize White Suspects – And Treat Young Victims of Color as Older and Guilty
When suspects are young, the difference in how the mainstream media treats them is clear.

Studies show implicit biases lead many of us to see innocent Black children as guilty adults.
And it’s no wonder that our impression depends on the child’s race, when the source of much of our information – the mainstream media – reminds us that young white suspects are “kids.”
Even Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed children in Newton, Connecticut, was described in headlines as a “deeply disturbed kid.”
Tamir Rice, on the other hand, is a 12 year old Black boy who was playing with a toy gun when he was killed by police less than two seconds after their arrival.
Tamir was the victim in this case, the one who tragically lost his life. But when the media calls him a “young man” and reminds us that he was “big for his age,” they’re not just reporting information on the tragic death of a child.
They’re not talking about why police are twenty-one times more likely to kill young Black men than young white men.
In fact, they’re helping justify violence and mass incarceration against youth of color, by characterizing them as dangerous criminals, whether they’re victims or not.
7. They Discredit Justice Movements for People of Color – And Give Rioting White People a Pass
Your media guide to the differences between #Ferguson and #pumpkinfest pic.twitter.com/XfRjlhgei0
— Matt Weinecke (@MattTW) October 19, 2014
Not everyone’s buying the media’s biased stories.
Racial justice activists put blood, sweat, and tears into advocating for justice for victims of color, and their voices help bring attention to the truth about racism.
Unfortunately, many of us have to filter through bias to hear activist voices, too.
And there’s a huge difference between how the media portrays mass gatherings advocating for people of color and those with groups of white people.
Protests for Freddie Gray in Baltimore, for instance, were part of a national grassroots movement, Black Lives Matter. They included dynamic speakers, wise youth leaders, deep analyses of issues of inequality, and even a Michael Jackson impersonator dancing to “show positivity” and raise money for the Gray family.
Pretty impressive, right?
But that wasn’t the impression you would’ve gotten from watching or reading coverage of the protests in the mainstream media.
Their coverage was focused almost entirely on “riots,” “looting,” and “destruction.” After 10,000 marched peacefully one day, the next morning’s headlines included words like “chaos,” “destruction,” and “violence” to talk about the few agitators who strayed from the protest to vandalize.
The media blew the vandalism out of proportion, spread inaccurate information about how the chaotic moments began, and used one word over and over again to characterize the protesters, the vast majority of whom were advocating for peace.
That word was “thugs.”
Clearly, not just anyone who gathers in mass or causes destruction gets called a “thug” in the media. If that were the case, then white people who destroy things in the name of sports or who riot over pumpkins would get the same treatment, but the media doesn’t portray those people as dangerous criminals.
Even when mobs of white people are committing violent crimes, the media doesn’t treat them this way.
White biker gangs in Waco, Texas beat, stabbed, and shot each other, and fired at police, in a bloody brawl that resulted in nine deaths. The media called it a “rumble,” and a “meeting” to “settle their differences” – and the word “thug” was noticeably absent.
This double standard isn’t just unfair – it’s also holding back progress in the fight against racial injustice.
A recent study found that white Americans believe protesting improves the nation – unless Black folks are the ones protesting. That’s the dangerous impact of the media’s bias.
The more people believe the mainstream media’s idea that activists of color are “destroying their own neighborhoods” with unwarranted protests, the harder we have to fight to spread the word about the change we need.
8. They Put Victims of Color at Fault – And White Suspects in Self-Defense Mode
If it seems like white attackers had no choice but to defend themselves with violence, that also helps to justify violence against people of color in the public’s eyes.

The media sets the stage for this narrative with biases that lead us to see people of color as guilty, and they can really drive it home with as little as a hint that a victim of color was at fault for their own attack.
For example, African-American teenager Renisha McBride was reportedly asking for help after a car accident in a mostly-white neighborhood, and Theodore Wafer had no reason to kill her. But he did, and the media focused on whether or not she was drunk at the time of her murder – in spite of the fact that she likely posed no threat to the shooter.
South Carolina Officer Michael Slager also had no reason to kill Walter Scott. And at first, the news reported his version of the events that led him to shoot Scott in “self-defense.”
It wasn’t until after a civilian’s video of the shooting was released that the media reported on the real story: Slager shot Walter Scott in the back as he ran away, posing absolutely no threat to the officer. He then put his taser beside Scott’s body to make it look like self-defense, and lied about it.
And the media ate it up and fed it to us.
What else are we missing when we believe the mainstream media’s stories without thinking critically about their biases?
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The bad news is that this all shows just how deeply white privilege and racism are ingrained in the everyday media we consume.
The good news is that many of these examples also show that we have the power to resist the media’s biased messages and get to the truth.
In this digital age, people are recording incidents of police brutality and harassment, forcing us to confront what’s really going on when an unarmed victim is no longer alive to tell their side of the story.
We’re participating on social media with hashtags like #AliveWhileBlack and #CrimingWhileWhite, to show how the mainstream media’s narrative doesn’t reflect what it means to be targeted because you’re Black, or granted the benefit of the doubt because you’re white.
We’re speaking up and spreading the word when the mainstream media demonizes people of color, and telling our own stories about who we are.
You can help, by amplifying the voices of people speaking out.
For the love of justice, turn off the mainstream news channels and support alternative media instead. Seek out the information that’s on the ground with grassroots organizations analyzing the root causes of violence without the lens of white supremacy.
Talk to your friends and community members about how the media can influence our perceptions, and about how you can change the conversation so this biased influence stops spreading.
The six Black women and three Black men who lost their lives in Charleston were all inspirational models of leadership in their communities.
We can never get them back, and we can’t erase the way the mainstream media failed them by misrepresenting the cause of their deaths.
But for them, for Sandra Bland, and for all of those who were killed or traumatized, only to be re-victimized by the media, we need to demand more respect for people of color.
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Criminal Immigrant Myth
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NY Times: The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant
The Trump administration’s first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump’s latest target is sanctuary cities.
“Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities,” he said last week. “They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.”
As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not.
Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.
In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country.

According to data from the study, a large majority of the areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study’s data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board.
In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower — 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980.
And yet the argument that immigrants bring crime into America has driven many of the policies enacted or proposed by the administration so far: restrictions to entry, travel and visas; heightened border enforcement; plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. This month, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California in response to the state’s restrictions on local police to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants charged with crimes. On Tuesday, California’s Orange County signed on in support of that suit. But while the immigrant population in the county has more than doubled since 1980, overall violent crime has decreased by more than 50 percent.
There’s a similar pattern in two other places where Mr. Trump has recently feuded with local leaders: Oakland, Calif., and Lawrence, Mass. He described both cities as breeding grounds for drugs and crime brought by immigrants. But Oakland, like Orange County, has had increasing immigration and falling crime. In Lawrence, though murder and robbery rates grew, overall violent crime rates still fell by 10 percent.
In general, the study’s data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two, and that the 54 areas in the study where both grew were instances of coincidence, not cause and effect. This was a consistent pattern in each decade from 1980 to 2016, with immigrant populations and crime failing to grow together.
In a majority of areas, the number of immigrants increased at least 57 percent and as much as 183 percent, with the greatest increases occurring in the 1990s and early 2000s. Violent crime rates in most areas ranged between a 43 percent decline and a 6 percent rise, often trending downward by the 2000s. Places with a sharp rise in the immigrant population experienced increases in crime rates no more frequently than those with modest or no growth in immigration. On average, the immigrant population grew by 137 percent between 1980 and 2016, with average crime falling 12 percent over the same period.
Because the F.B.I. changed how rape was defined in its crime figures, that category could not be included in this analysis. Focusing on the other components of the violent crime rate — assaults, robberies and murders — still fails to reveal a relationship with immigration rates.
Most areas experienced decreases in all types of violent crime. The change in assault rates ranged from a 34 percent decline to a 29 percent rise, while robbery rates declined in the range of 12 percent to 57 percent, and murder rates declined in the range of 15 percent to 54 percent.
This analysis is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of the local immigrant-crime relationship. It spans decades of metropolitan area data, incorporating places with widely differing social, cultural and economic backgrounds, and a broad range of types of violent crime.
Areas were chosen to reflect a range of immigrant composition, from Wheeling, W.Va., where one in 100 people was born outside the United States, to Miami, where every second person was. Some areas were home to newly formed immigrant communities; other immigrant pockets went back generations. Controlling for population characteristics, unemployment rates and other socioeconomic conditions, the researchers still found that, on average, as immigration increases in American metropolises, crime decreases.
The foreign-born data, which is collected through the census, most likely undercounts the numbers of undocumented immigrants, many of whom might wish to avoid the risk of identifying themselves. They are, however, at least partly represented in the overall foreign-born population counts.
This is not the only study showing that immigration does not increase crime. A broad survey released in January examined years of research on the immigrant-crime connection, concluding that an overwhelming majority of studies found either no relationship between the two or a beneficial one, in which immigrant communities bring economic and cultural revitalization to the neighborhoods they join.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for its newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter. Anna Flagg is an interactive reporter for The Marshall Project.
In the recent study, Mr. Adelman and his team collected crime and foreign-born population data for 200 metropolitan statistical areas for the years 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. The Marshall Project extended the data set to include 2016, obtaining foreign-born numbers from the American Community Survey one-year estimates and crime figures from the F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reporting Program metropolitan area data sets. When either foreign-born or crime information was unavailable for 2016, the corresponding 2015 data was substituted.
Some metropolitan areas changed over time, growing to include additional regions, or splitting into separate ones. The Marshall Project consulted with the study researchers to determine when a larger area was still an appropriate match to the original described in the study. When an area split into components, raw data from each was added to calculate rates approximating the original region. When no reasonable approximation to the original area could be found, it was marked as missing for 2016.
When an area was missing information for a certain year, that year’s data was interpolated using figures from the closest year available. For example, crime numbers were unavailable for Chicago for 2000 and 2010. Data for those years was linearly interpolated using the 1990 and 2016 figures. Charlotte, N.C., was not included in either the 2016 or 2015 U.C.R. metropolitan area data sets, so data from 2010, the most recent year with available data for this area, was used as an estimate.
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Everyday Feminism: 4 Racist Stereotypes White Patriarchy Invented to ‘Protect’ White Womanhood
The ‘Hispanic Criminal’
The stereotype of the “Hispanic Criminal” isn’t something that Donald Trump just made up, although it has certainly gained popularity due to him.
The idea that Latinos – specifically Mexican, Central, and South American men – are criminals and rapists has been perpetuated for a long time.
A major sexual stereotype about Latinos is that they’re suave lovers who can seduce anyone, especially white women. Another aspect of this stereotype is that Latinos specifically target white women in order to corrupt them. The trope goes that Latino criminals, usually drug dealers, kill white men and steal their women and money.
An important historical moment in the perpetuation of this stereotype emerged when weed was made illegal. During the 1930s, the Drug Enforcement Administration began to use racist propaganda. They said that most weed users were Black and Chicano men who would rape and murder their white neighbors.
Unfortunately, with growing rates of racism and xenophobia, this stereotype has only gained traction, even amongst “liberal” white women such as Amy Schumer. Media isn’t consumed in a vacuum. Racist jokes aren’t just tasteless; they perpetuate harmful ideas. Perpetuating violent stereotypes, even as jokes, simply normalizes them.
It not only makes it seem okay for everyone to “joke around” about racialized rape, but it also makes it difficult to have real, intra-community conversations about sexual assault.
When violent stereotypes are perpetuated about a community, these are the only characteristics attributed to folks. That makes it very easy to have a gut-reaction of “that never happens!” in order to dispel these stereotypes. When that happens, it can be very impossible for survivors of assault to speak their truth.
These stereotypes not only perpetuate violence against Latinos, but against all Latinxs.
Orientalism
Edward Said – Orientalism and the Politics of Stereotypes in News
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Learn more at the People’s School of DC Xenophobia Page
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