Last year, police in the U.S. killed 1,099 people, according to Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group. Black people accounted for 24% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population.
‘A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents’ voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.’ — James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’
— Rich Benjamin, author of ‘Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America’ “There are people who see the black man as angry or threatening,” he said. In 2018, Williams created a campaign called 56BlackMen, a series of stark portraits of black men from all walks of life wearing hoodies to show, in his words, “I am Not My Stereotype.
The video may have been unpleasant to watch, but it was not something seen as unfamiliar to many black men. “I was mortified by the Amy Cooper incident, but struck by a bit of recognition when you have a white person who perceives you to have less rights than they, and they to have more rights than you,” said Rich Benjamin, author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.
“ ‘We’re talking about systemic racism, and relying upon a story that has been morphed, honed and perfected.’ ” In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 racially motivated lynchings of African-Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between 1877 and 1950 — at least 800 more lynchings of black people in these states than had previously been reported.
“Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police,” a recent study by researchers from Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis found. “Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.” They wrote, “Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.
Cases in which fictitious black men were accused of crimes are too numerous to list, but some have caught the mainstream public’s attention more than others. In 1994, Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother of two, told police a black man had driven off with her young children strapped into the back of the car. After her car was found in a lake, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murders of her 3- and 1-year-olds.
“People walk around with these intergenerational images and stereotypes in this locked closet within their minds, their souls,” he added. “Whenever they are exposed to the language of ‘the other,’ this locked closet opens up, and all of these images come out. It could even come out as policies and programs that discriminate, and stop one having access to resources.”
— Cephas Williams, artist “We’re seeing this around the country,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said when the figures on racial disparity began trickling out at the beginning of the public-health crisis. He said the same pattern was found in major cities across the U.S., some worse than New York City. “You know, it always seems that the poorest people pay the highest price. Why is that?”
“Redlining” housing policies, the refusal of financial services to neighborhoods typically populated by people of color, are still felt today. The term refers to how the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew up color-coded maps that designated how risky it was for lenders to originate mortgages in different neighborhoods across the country.
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