racism

I keep coming across people asking what these riots are supposed to accomplish, how burning down buildings helps anyone’s cause, why people are “destroying their own neighborhoods,” and so on.

I’m not the best one to try to explain. I’ve pretty much never been on the receiving end of real oppression. I’m not living in any of the communities that are dealing with the protests and riots right now. So as much as possible, I’m going to refer to other sources and other people’s words.

To begin with, I’ve seen people — almost exclusively white — referencing MLK as a way to condemn the riots. So let’s review King’s 1967 speech “The Other America,” in which he said:

I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.

But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. [Emphasis added]

There’s a lot of finger-pointing as to who’s actually instigating the violence. The Mayor of St. Paul noted that “every person arrested in the city last night was from out of state,” but later rescinded that claim, saying he’d received incorrect information during a police briefing. (Source)

The same article also notes, however, “Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington confirmed evidence of white supremacist groups trying to incite violence; Many posted messages online that encouraged people to go loot in Minneapolis and cause mayhem.”

And while not all those arrested were from out-of-state, at least some were. “Hennepin County jail logs showed detainees from Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois and Alaska.” (Source)

Online, most of what I see blames “the other side.” The left blames police agitators, white supremicists, etc. The right blames BLM and antifa. And as with any fast-moving, emotional news story, it’s hard to pin down the facts, especially for those of us at a distance.

Are there outside agitators, people specifically trying to fan the flames and incite violence? Yep. Take this guy, for example:

• A white man was filmed smashing windows at an AutoZone. It’s been reported that this was one of the first acts of destruction that ignited more rioting in Minneapolis. There are claims he was a police officer, but I haven’t seen proof of this one way or another.

Are the police escalating things by firing paint canisters at people sitting peacefully on their porch, firing on news crews, pepper spraying helpless reporters, and so much more? Absolutely.

(It’s also enlightening to see the difference in police response to these protests when compared to the armed white protesters who stormed Michigan’s capitol building, threatening the Governor’s life, screaming in the cops’ faces, and forcing a shutdown of the capitol.)

And is some of the looting coming from people within the communities? Probably, yes.

“But why can’t they protest peacefully?” ask those on the outside, people who, for the most part, haven’t been directly impacted by the underlying problems.

Like MLK said, America has failed to hear. Peaceful protests have been happening all along. We’ve chosen not to listen.

When Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest of police brutality against black people, he was fired and blacklisted, and attacked by no less than the President of the United States.

Riots are the language of the unheard. What is it that’s been unheard? Maybe the fact that black men have a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by the police, far higher than any other group.

Here are some other stats from the same research:

• Black people are about twice as likely as white people to be pulled over by law enforcement for a traffic stop
• Black and Latino drivers are much more likely to be searched once they are pulled over by the police
• The murders of white people are more likely to be solved than the murders of black people
• White people make up less than half of America’s murder victims, yet 80 percent of the convicted murderers sentenced to death had killed a white person
• Black Americans are much more likely to be arrested and charged for drug-related crimes, despite no significant disparity in how much those populations actually use narcotics
• Potential jurors who are black are much more likely to be dismissed by prosecutors than potential white jurors
• White defendants are substantially more likely than black defendants to have their most serious charge dismissed as part of a plea bargain
• Even when black men and white men are convicted of the same crime, the black men can expect a prison sentence that is 20 percent longer

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I do think it’s important to listen. Listen, particularly, to those who’ve been hurt. To those who have been suffering inequity for their entire lives.

For example, see Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson who met with protesters, talked to them, listened to them, and ended up joining their march. The protest remained peaceful, and no arrests were made. (Source)

You want to know why people are angry? They’ve been telling us, again and again, for years. If you really want to know, all you have to do is listen.

In some respects, this is a retread of a blog post I did on Halloween three years ago, about the way we as Americans treat “Gypsies” as imaginary fantasy beings, like elves and wizards. But I keep running up against it. Last week it was someone doing their “Gypsy” accent and talking about their costume. The next day, one of the blogs I follow used an image of an old “Gypsy” fortune telling machine as part of a post about the current political situation.

When I pointed out to one of these individuals that “Gypsy” was a racial slur*, they said they knew, but used it because people wouldn’t understand, otherwise.

Look, the treatment of the Romani people throughout history has been horrific, and continues to be to this day. We’re talking about a group who have been persecuted, enslaved, and murdered for centuries. Here are a handful of the many examples:

• 1749: The “Great Roundup” in Spain. During the reign of Ferdinand VI in Spain, thousands of Romani were “deported, interned, subjected to forced labour, punished, hurt and killed.”
• 19th-20th Century: The Church of Norway and the Roma of Norway.
  • “End of 19th century: Legal to shoot Roma people, priests that gave baptism, confirmation, wedding or funeral to Roma people were in risk of losing their job.”
  • “Most of 20th century: Children were taken from their parents (1500 children out of a population of less than 10.000 were either brought up at other people’s homes or in institutions) laws were enacted to make it impossible for Roma to continue their traditional living and Roma were subject to forced sterilization, often without their knowledge.”
• 20th Century: Hounded in Europe, Roma in the U.S. Keep a Low Profile. “One law in New Jersey, enacted in 1917 and repealed in 1998, allowed Gypsies to be regulated more harshly than other groups by allowing local governments to craft laws and ordinances that specified where Gypsies could rent property, where they could entertain and what goods they could sell.”
• World War II: The Roma Genocide. The Roma were among the first victims of Hitler and his Nazis. “[A]t least 500.000 Roma were victims of the genocide, amounting to perhaps as much as 70-80% of the total Roma population in Europe at the time.”
• 1979: Sterilised Roma accuse Czechs. Beginning in 1979, Czech doctors sterilized Roma women against their wills. This policy officially ended in 1990, but human rights groups say the practice continued through at least 2003.
• 2008: This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe. Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni responded to a wave of violence against the Roma people with the quote, “That is what happens when Gypsies steal babies.”
• 2012: The situation of Roma in 11 EU Member States. “[O]ne in three is unemployed, 20% are not covered by health insurance, and 90% are living below the poverty line. Many face prejudice, intolerance, discrimination and social exclusion in their daily lives. They are marginalised and mostly live in extremely poor socio-economic conditions.”
• 2016: NYCC ’16: Anti-Romani Statements Made at X-Men LGBTQ Panel. American author Peter David defended the portrayal of Romani people as thieves, relaying a story about how Roma parents break their children’s legs to make them more effective beggars. David refused to discuss the issue further, and “told the questioner to go away.” (David later apologized, saying he was mortified and ashamed of himself.)

There’s a lot more information out there about the Roma and the discrimination they continued to face. There are an estimated one million Roma living in the U.S. today, but many prefer to keep a low profile. From the Hounded in Europe article linked above, “‘Traditionally, nothing good has come from being identified Roma because the prejudice is so high,’ says Robert Kushen, executive director of the European Roma Rights Center.”

I grew up ignorant. I had no clue “Gypsies” were a real thing. I thought nothing of the person in my D&D group who played as, and later dressed up as, a “Gypsy” character. Eventually, a friend of Romani descent helped me start to open my eyes.

In the U.S., racism against the Roma is similar in some ways to racism against Native Americans. We erase them, replacing real, living people with stereotypes and costumes and caricatures. The idea of a white person dressing in black face and putting on a minstrel show would horrify to most of us today, but people think nothing of dressing up in their homemade “Gypsy costume” and putting on their best fortune-teller act for Halloween or the local Renaissance Festival.

Is that conscious, deliberate hatred or intolerance? Not always. But it’s still racism. It’s still hurtful and damaging to a marginalized group that’s been targeted for hatred and extermination for centuries.

Harm done in ignorance is still harm.

—
*The last time I talked about this, a commenter challenged whether “Gypsy” (or the derived word “gypped,” which is essentially equivalent to saying “Jewed”) was really a racial slur, or if I as a white person not of Roma descent was just White-Knighting and making a big deal over nothing. Here are a few links and references for that conversation.

• Always Romani, But Never a Gypsy. “It is an ethnic slur word for my people. Originally it alleged incorrectly that we came from Egypt, instead of India, but, over the centuries, it has come to imply we are thieves.”
• The Problem with the Word “Gypsy”. “There are Romanies (like myself) who take no offense to the word, and in fact, have embraced it and there are others who abhor the word, likening it to the word ‘nigger’ when describing an African American or ‘spic’ and ‘wetback’ to refer to a person of Mexican heritage.”
• I’m sorry, but no you cannot & never will you be. “This little word, ‘gypsy’, makes my skin crawl. It causes aches in my heart and beats at my soul. I die a little inside everytime I must say or write the word. ‘Gypsy’ is a racial slur. It is tantamount to the ‘N’ word. Like the ‘N’ word, ‘gypsy’ was created by people who believed we were sub-human and enslaved us.”

I had a long layover in Minneapolis when I was flying out to Launch Pad at the start of the month, and ended up in a bit of a heated Twitter exchange, as one does. It started with this Tweet.

Folks pissed abt. Hermione being black b/c “she’s white in the books.” Oops! Can’t use that excuse for your racism. pic.twitter.com/AhVH7M1nt4

— Jim C. Hines (@jimchines) June 1, 2016

Naturally, this led to responses like, “Why make this automatically about racism? People can’t disagree just because they don’t think it’s true to character?” and “Assuming they’re racist w/o knowing anything else about them makes you guilty of same prejudice you accuse them of,” along with the ever-popular, “Is that actress best audition, or was production going just for ‘diversity’?”

What is it about the suggestion that someone or something might be racist that makes people lose their minds? It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago where in I was told, in all seriousness, that yeah, racism is bad, but being accused of racism is worse.

Some thoughts in the aftermath of that argument earlier this month:

1. Saying, “Hey, this thing/comment/whatever is racist” does not mean “You personally are a horrible person who should be shot and stabbed and otherwise killed to death for your horrible horribleness.”

We live in an imperfect world. It’s pretty much impossible to grow up in a context of racism and sexism and other forms of inequality and discrimination without having some of that garbage get into your head. We all stumble. We all make mistakes. We’ve all absorbed messed-up ideas and assumptions. That doesn’t mean we’re all horrible, awful people. It means we’re human.

Doubling down on racism and other ugliness, on the other hand? Defending and trying to justify it? Belittling and minimizing it? Assuming it’s so much more important to wave your “I’M NOT RACIST!” flag than it is to actually, you know, try to fight and reduce racism? Yeah, that crap steps you closer to the horrible person category.

2. Questioning whether a person of color was picked just for the sake of diversity? That’s pretty messed up. And yeah, racist. Let’s talk about why.

Take a look at this chart, from a PBS article about race in Hollywood.

In 2010, non-Hispanic whites made up 63.7% of the U.S. population, but we consistently have about 75% of the roles in these films. We’re overrepresented. And yet how often does anyone ask if a white actor was cast not because they had the best audition, but as a result of their whiteness? To meet some unconscious white quota, or for the sake of making sure the film is white enough to be comfortable for “mainstream” audiences, whatever that means?

If you assume white actors (or authors, or speakers, or whatever) got the job because they were best qualified, but question whether people of color were chosen to meet some kind of diversity quota, guess what?

3. Reading comprehension is important.

Before you go off with knee-jerk defensiveness, make sure you understand what’s being said. Re: Hermione, one response I saw was that people had gotten used to Emma Watson as Hermione, and between that and illustrations in some editions of the books that portrayed her as white, it was totally understandable that people might stumble over seeing a black actress take over the role.

Personally, I’m having trouble adjusting to all of the new actors, having imprinted pretty strongly on the movie cast. But that’s not what I was tweeting about. I didn’t say anything about people who were having trouble resetting their mental Hermione. I was talking to people who are pissed off about it.

If the only casting change you’re struggling with is the role of Hermione, and if you’re actively pissed off about that one change? Please see the previous gif.

4. What’s up with the whole, “Talking about race/racism makes you racist!” fallacy?

It feels like elementary school-style arguing. “I know you are but what am I?”

Pointing out that white people are overrepresented in Hollywood doesn’t actually make me racist against white people, no matter how much you want to play the “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” card.

It’s almost like people don’t understand what racism is. Or they don’t want to understand. They don’t want to learn, or to try to change anything for the better. They just want to shut down the conversation.

Or maybe it’s the colorblindness fallacy. The idea that “I don’t see color” is a good thing, and falling short of that ideal makes you racist. The thing is, “not seeing color” means refusing to see or acknowledge the whole of who people are. It means ignoring systemic inequality and discrimination, because how can you see racism when you refuse to see race? It’s a luxury, a way or turning your back on very real problems. Basically, it’s a cop-out.

5. Some commentary from folks who aren’t me.

I Don’t See Color” – An excellent article by Michi Trota.

The Effect of Media Representation on Self-Esteem. “Television exposure predicted a decrease in self-esteem for white and black girls and black boys, and an increase in self-esteem among white boys.” Is anyone shocked by this?

As a black girl who identified with Hermione soooo much growing up, thank you @jk_rowling. Twelve year old me is crying happy tears.

— A.C. Thomas (@acthomaswrites) December 20, 2015

I love how Hermione being black is somehow more implausible to some people than a universe where the entire postal system depends on owls

— Count Snooku (@QueerDiscOx) December 20, 2015

We found the best actress and she’s black. Bye bye, now. https://t.co/1fGmP5znHP

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 10, 2016

So a handful of trolls decided to start a Boycott Star Wars VII hashtag on Twitter, claiming that the movie erases white male heroes and promotes white genocide and whatever. Star Wars: Aftermath author Chuck Wendig talks about it a bit here. The Mary Sue weighs in here. There’s been plenty of mockery, as well as folks pointing out some of the obvious irony. (Y’all know the most iconic figure in the franchise was voiced by a black man, right?)

There’s also folks pointing out that this was nothing but trolls begging for attention, and that the internet fell for it. Ah, internet. So gullible!

I read some of the 4chan board so you don’t have to. I can’t read minds, but yeah, there’s a good chance folks were stirring shit for attention and LOLs. But here’s the thing. You know Clarke’s Law? The one that says any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? Well…

Any sufficiently hateful trolling is indistinguishable from bigotry.

The same folks crowing about how they suckered those stupid SJWs into reacting are also going on about how the black protagonist in The Force Awakens looks like a gorilla, how they can’t reshoot the film just because the protagonist is a n****r, and worse. Are these people trying to be ironically racist, or are they just bigoted assholes?

As it turns out, I don’t actually give a shit. Whether they truly believe a more diverse cast in Star Wars = promoting white genocide, that’s the message they’ve chosen to spread, and whatever the original intent, that message has attracted others. It’s become a magnet for spreading racism and antisemitism and hate.

If you punch me in the face, do you think I care whether or not you were doing it “ironically”?

If you truly believe that casting a black man and a white woman as leads in a Star Wars movie should be equated to genocide, you’re a racist asshole. But if you believe stirring up talk of boycotting Star Wars because they cast a black man and a white woman is a good way to get attention? You’re also a racist asshole.

Go ahead, please boycott the new Star Wars movie. I find I enjoy my movies more when there are fewer whiny, bigoted assholes in the theater. Better boycott Star Trek as well. I mean, you wouldn’t want to catch any of those icky “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” cooties. Boycott Marvel, where they’ve introduced a black Captain America and a black/Latino Spider-Man and an Asian-American Hulk. Boycott Legend of Korra and their non-white, non-straight heroines. Boycott video games for including transgender characters and nonwhite characters and more. As the push for diversity and inclusion continues to grow, you might want to boycott the whole damn field of science fiction and fantasy.

So either grow the hell up and stop fighting a losing battle to build a wall around the genre, or else boycott yourself right out of fandom, and let the rest of us enjoy a community with a few less bigoted assholes.

You can even boycott “ironically,” if that’s what it takes to get you to leave.

This is a companion piece to go with the charts I posted in Two Thoughts on Ferguson. That post showed the disproportionate number of police-inflicted deaths in the U.S. compared to Australia, Germany, and England & Wales, as well as the fact that when you look at the percentage by population, black people in the U.S. are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people.

The links below are some of those deaths from 2014. This is in no way a complete list.

#

February 16. Bastrop County, TX. 47-year-old black woman Yvette Smith was shot and killed by white police officer Daniel Willis after opening the door for police. Police had been responding to a call about an altercation between two men. Police initially claimed Smith was armed and ignored their commands. They later retracted these claims. Officer Willis was indicted for murder in June.

April 30. Milwaukee, WI. A mentally ill 31-year-old black man named Dontre Hamilton was shot 14 times by white police officer Christopher Manney. An autopsy suggested that roughly half of those shots were fired from above, as if Manney was standing over Hamilton.

July 17. New York City, NY. 43-year-old black man Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by white police officer Daniel Pantaleo. Police had confronted Garner on suspicion of selling loose/untaxed cigarettes. Garner was heard on video saying, “I can’t breathe” eleven times. The grand jury declined to indict the officer.

August 5. Beavercreek, OH. 22-year-old black man John Crawford was shot and killed by white police officer Sean Williams while carrying a BB rifle inside of a Walmart store. Police claim Crawford was waving the rifle around and refused to obey orders. Surveillance video contradicts this. No officers were indicted.

August 9. Ferguson, MO. 18-year-old black man Michael Brown was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson. A grand jury did not indict the officer. Between payment for an interview with ABC and donations from various fundraisers, Wilson has reportedly received more than $1,000,000 as a direct result of killing Michael Brown.

August 11. Los Angeles, CA. An unarmed, mentally ill, 25-year-old black man named Ezell Ford was shot and killed by two LA police officers. Officers claim Ford resisted and tried to grab an officer’s weapon. Other accounts claim Ford was cooperating, and was shot in the back while lying on the ground. The autopsy of Ford’s body has not yet been released.

September 10. Saratoga Springs, UT. 22-year-old black man Darrien Hunt was shot six times in the back by two white police officers, Matthew Schauerhamer and Nicholas Judson, while cosplaying and carrying a decoartive sword. Video appears to show Hunt running for his life moments before being killed. Neither officer will face criminal charges.

November 12. Cleveland, OH. Mentally ill 37-year-old black woman Tanesha Anderson was killed after police officers slammed her head into the pavement during a “take-down.” Anderson’s brother claims officers made no attempt to resuscitate her.

November 20. Brooklyn, NY. 28-year-old black man Akai Gurley was killed when police officer Peter Liang fired a single shot while patrolling a housing complex. EMTs arrived a short time later to find Gurley’s girlfriend — not the police — performing CPR. According to the NY Daily News, the officer who killed Gurley was texting his union representative instead of calling for medical help.

November 22. Cleveland, OH. A 12-year-old black boy named Tamir Rice was shot by white police officer Timothy Loehmann. Rice had been playing with a toy gun, which a 911 operator was told “was probably fake.” Video shows Loehmann shot Rice within two seconds of arriving on the scene. Officers did not administer first aid.

December 2. Phoenix, AZ. An unarmed 34-year-old black man named Rumain Brisbon was shot and killed by police. A police spokesman says Brisbon was verbally challenging and reached for something in his pocket/waistband (which turned out to be oxycodone pills). Witness statements contradict this.

About three years ago, World Fantasy Award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor wrote an essay about Lovecraft’s Racism and the World Fantasy Award Statuette. Earlier this year, author and editor Daniel José Older started a petition to change the World Fantasy Award trophy to Octavia Butler. There’s been plenty of other discussion, but those are two of the pieces that stood out to me, and seemed to generate a lot of awareness and debate.

There is now a counter-petition to keep Lovecraft and fight back against the forces of the Social Justice League, or something like that.

I’m not sure we should make Octavia Butler the new WFA statuette, in part because I’m not sure any specific individual is the best image for an award meant to represent the world of fantasy. But I am 100% on board with getting rid of the trophy we have now.

First of all, I’m sorry, but I find the trophy to be almost obscenely ugly. I get that it’s intended to be a caricature, and artist Gahan Wilson is obviously a skilled sculptor and artist. But Wilson’s style is described as “fantasy-horror” and “playful grotesque,” and I just don’t think one of the top awards in our field should be embodied by the word “grotesque.”

As numerous others have pointed out, there’s a deeper level of grotesqueness. Lovecraft undeniably influenced the fantasy and horror genre. He was also undeniably racist. In Nnedi’s blog post, she quotes Lovecraft’s 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers“:

This isn’t the only example of racism in Lovecraft’s work, though it’s one of the more blatant. Phenderson Djeli Clark has an essay examining Lovecraft’s racism at Racialicious.

Steven Stevenson disagrees, and posted a counter-petition to “Keep the beloved H.P. Lovecraft caricature busts (‘Howards’) as World Fantasy Awards trophies, don’t ban them to be PC!”

The very first sentence describes Lovecraft’s “racism” in scare quotes — because sure, the guy’s writing was full of references to “subhuman swine” and the “negro problem” and “sneering, greasy mulattos” and how blacks are “vastly inferior” and “negro fetishism” and a cat called “Nigger Man” and so on. But let’s not leap to conclusions and label such things racist.

Stevenson admits that some of Lovecraft’s personal views were “less than ideal.” But he quickly explains that Lovecraft was a product of his time.

This excuse is, to use the technical term, bullshit.

Lovecraft was a product of his time, and spewed an awful lot of hateful, racist shit in his fiction and in his personal writing. There are a lot of other authors who were a product of that same time, and they somehow managed to avoid dousing every page in fetid, over-the-top racism.

This isn’t to say Lovecraft’s contemporaries were perfect. L. Frank Baum wrote a nasty editorial regarding the Sioux nation. I could barely finish Edgar Rice Burrough’s first Tarzan novel. But while it is important to acknowledge historical and cultural context, Lovecraft’s bigotry is pretty extreme, even when examined within that context.

Samuel Bowers co-founded the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and was convicted of murdering several civil rights leaders. He was a product of his time. You know who else was a product of that exact same time? Mister Rogers. Any given time will produce a whole range of people, from amazing, kind, compassionate human beings to frightened, hateful cowards.

There’s no need to deny that Lovecraft was an influential writer. And nobody’s saying you’re not allowed to read or even enjoy his stories. (Though you might want to check out How to Be a Fan of Problematic Things.) But let’s not pretend the man didn’t hold and espouse some despicable views on race.

Stevenson hits other tired buzzwords and phrases in his petition. It’s just the “humourless PC crowd” who want the trophy changed. Arguing for that change is suggested to be a “fascist act.” He also throws in an attack on “the misandry … promoted by many self-described ‘feminist authors’.” Because if you’re going to play Defensive Apologist Bingo, you want to fill the whole damn board!

The complaints about Lovecraft and the World Fantasy Award aren’t about “diminish[ing] him for being male and Caucasian.” It’s about wanting something other than the bulging decapitated head of an over-the-top racist to embody one of the highest honors in our genre.

So yeah, if I haven’t made it clear before, add my voice to the crowd calling for a change. I don’t know that the trophy should be any specific individual, but at this point, I think just about anything would be an improvement. (Please don’t take that as a challenge to come up with something worse.)

A few data points for anyone who thinks what’s been happening in Ferguson, MO is an isolated incident as opposed to an ongoing, systemic problem.

• Ferguson Mayor James Knowles was asked about the diversity of his police department: 53 officers, just three of them African-American in a community that’s 67 percent African-American, according to 2010 Census data.
• Blacks in Ferguson are almost twice as likely to be searched during traffic stops; But statistically, Ferguson police find contraband significantly more often after searching whites.
  • From the same source, blacks in Ferguson are disproportionately more likely to be pulled over in the first place, and more likely to be arrested, than whites.

It’s not just Ferguson.

• Blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, and are consistently documented by the U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to people of other races. But blacks comprise nearly one – third ( 31 percent) of those arrested for drug law violations – and more than 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or federal prison for drug law violations.
• New Yorkers have been subjected to police stops and street interrogations more than 5 million times since 2002… [B]lack and Latino communities continue to be the overwhelming target of these tactics.
• A report on 313 black people killed by police, security guards, and vigilantes in 2012. Note that at least 44% were unarmed.
• [T]he young, the male, the Black and the Latino are disproportionately incarcerated. Put those factors together and you have almost 9% of Black men in their late 20s behind bars.
• A 2012 study found that unemployment rates “were highest for Blacks (13.8 percent) and for American Indians and Alaska Natives (12.3 percent).“
• On average, blacks receive almost 10% longer sentences than comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. At least half this gap can be explained by initial charging choices, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Prosecutors are … almost twice as likely to file such charges against blacks.
• There are 44 African American Members (8.1% of the total membership) in the 113th Congress. (The 2010 Census found that 12.6% of the population identified as Black or African American.)
• A 2010 study on racial motivation for hate crimes found that:
  • 18.2 percent stemmed from anti-white bias.
  • 69.8 percent were motivated by anti-black bias.
• The median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households.

There’s a lot more data out there, but I hope this will help people who are watching events in Ferguson and throughout the country, and having trouble understanding where all of the anger is coming from.