The Myth of Black Criminality

Often we hear that only poor people are targeted by the Criminal Justice System (CJS), however removing the racial component of the problem of poverty and crime in America by merely saying it's poor people that are affected is, in my opinion, one of the largest contributors to the kind of rhetoric being espoused about black criminality. It ignores the purposeful political process perpetuating prison populations for people of color and thus consents by ignorance and, if nothing else, by abnegation WHY we see the statistics that we see.

The BJS itself was worried about this and that is why they wrote a report on how the CJS is specifically and particularly damaging to black people yet somehow white people ALWAYS have to make it about white people again, perpetuating the system by disabusing it of its primarily racially charged components and origins, which I would also argue is the largest contributor to creating the necessity of movements like Black Lives Matter to bring attention and change to our clearly racist system of "Justice" in America that has largely contributed to WHY these people are poor in the first place.

There has been a concerted historical effort in America to make black and poor synonyms, by ignoring the racial component we are, in effect, ignoring the cause and effect of the problem itself. So here are the facts:

Let's start with an intelligent discourse on the Drug War and its impact on African-American communities throughout history using BJS/BOP sources.

Black people only make up about 15% of the population and yet we make up 37.7% of the prison population. ( https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp )

The common narrative I hear regarding this fact is that 'black people are just so violent and prone to crime'. However, the data doesn't support this conjecture. Most convicted felons are in prison for Drug Offenses at 46.3% (the next highest felony proportion is Weapons, Explosives, Arson at 16.9% and Sexual Offenses, of which white people make up 75% of sexual assault https://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF, at 8.7%) ( https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp ).

I find this very peculiar, because white and black people are involved with drugs (buying, selling, distribution) at roughly the same rates and yet black people are almost twice as likely to be arrested for it. Not only that, but when white people are eventually searched they are FOUR TIMES as likely to actually have the drugs on them, which is a statistic that doesn't rely on self-surveys and is empirically verifiable. ( https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/traffic-stop-data-shows-persistent-patterns-racial-bias-according-new-report )

Surely this is just a coincidence? Unfortunately not.
"Drug law enforcement is heavily concentrated in large urban places. To illustrate, large metropolitan areas are where 44% of Americans live and where 47% of illicit drug use occurs but where 60% of drug possession arrests occur.
With respect to place of residence, the races differ in ways that place black drug users at greater risk of arrest than white users. Large metropolitan areas are where 60% of blacks live but where 41% of whites live.
Moreover, large metropolitan areas are where 63% of black drug use occurs compared to 45% of white drug use."
( https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf )

It may also be worth mentioning the words of Nixon's White House Domestic Affairs Advisor, John Erlichman:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#War_on_drugs ).

Let's also not forgot the Iran-Contra scandal where the United States government targeted black and poor neighborhoods by flooding them with crack cocaine and shortly thereafter introduced the Drug Abuse Act of 1986 which established mandatory minimums and for-profit prisons to keep them impoverished and in prison, utterly obliterating black and poor families unfortunate enough to be victims of this predatory policing, sentencing, and imprisonment.
( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986 )

I think it's also worth mentioning how black people were coralled into the metropolitan areas after the world wars (i.e. ghettos) due to redlining that eventually led to the Fair Housing Act because banks and lenders would purposefully deny blacks and other minorities the loans needed to buy a house or would target black people explicitly to charge them more (i.e. reverse redlining, subprime mortgages that led to the 2008 financial crash). This combined with the overwhelming discrimination of black people utilizing the GI Bill during Jim Crow, where "Of the first 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites" makes it very obvious not only why black people tend to live mostly in metropolitan areas but perhaps shines some light on why they are so historically and aggressively targeted by police over crimes that were designed to keep them oppressed. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill ).

This is what we call "institutional racism" for the uninformed.

It's also worth noting that, without the impact of drug offenses, black people only make up about 10-15% of the prison population. So can we do away with this surreptitious notion that most/some/a few black people are violent criminals with a penchant for crime yet? I think it's time we took another look at this destructive for-profit drug war that our governments are participating in and exploiting to keep impoverished and uneducated people shackled by debt, disarray, and destruction.

THIS is what Black Lives Matter is trying to fight.

If you have any questions, comments, or rebuttals then please let me know. Let's have a data-driven conversation.

I also think it's worth highlighting the fact that an overwhelming majority of the homocides involving black people are drug-related. Adjusting for the removal of the drug war, homocide involving black people would actually be lower than homocide involving white people, who are much more likely to use arson or poison to kill people and also to take multiple victims.
( https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf )

As an aside, because I've seen it throughout this post, it's intellectually dishonest to claim that because of a few black people concentrated in gangs in ghettos, which make up an average of 50% of all violent crime and up to 90% in some jurisdictions https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/2011-national-gang-threat-assessment, out of over 45 MILLION BLACK PEOPLE, that black people somehow harbor a culture of inherent violence without also saying that, for instance, because white men commit white-on-white violent crime at four times the rate as black-on-white violent crime (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rhovo1215.pdf), are imprisoned for 75% of all sexual assault and almost 60% of mass shootings (https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/) that white people don't somehow have a culture of inherent sexual infringement or violence. Hopefully, looking at it from the other side of the melanin will help people realize how UTTERLY RIDICULOUS that claim is. I'm guessing it's because of popular hip-hop, which is owned, distributed, and bought in an overwhelming majority by, you guessed it, white people. (https://images.genius.com/1e0e9b689ff35492f01c2a9bc2f311c5.600x310x1.png | https://newrepublic.com/article/120894/david-samuels-rap-rap-1991)

TLDR: The Criminal Justice System disproportionally affects black people at a rate that would be hilariously ignorant to juxtapose to its impact on white people.