BLACK MEN: MOST HATED, MOST FEARED MOST IMITATED

DO YOU KNOW WHY THERE ARE MORE BLACK MEN IN JAIL THAN ANYONE ELSE? IT’S NOT BECAUSE THEY COMMIT MORE CRIMES! The racists among us, blatant and closeted, will be quick to attribute the imprisonment disparity to the misguided belief that blacks are inherently prone to criminality. I’ve seen no valid studies supporting that view. Blacks are disproportionately targeted, stopped, arrested, prosecuted, sentenced to long mandatory prison terms and executed. A study by the California Judicial Council Advisory Committee on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts found that the justice system gives little attention or resources to investigating crimes against minorities and that minority defendants receive harsh treatment compared to white defendants in similar circumstances. The study also found that black-on-black crime or Latino-on-Latino crime is not taken as seriously as crimes against whites. Judges seem to believe that violence is more “acceptable” to black women because they are viewed as coming from violent communities. A study by the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project, which tracks the demographics of who in our society goes to prison and for what kinds of crimes, found that black men are going to jail in record numbers due to a surge in arrests for non-violent drug offenses. The Sentencing Project also found that in 1993, 88% of those sentenced federally for crack cocaine distribution were black, while only 4.1% of the defendants were white. This, while there are …