Crime is essentially a social issue, but it also grows exponentially where there’s tolerance for it, then it becomes cultural.
In the United States, for example, most of the criminal activities in and around large and small cities may be traced directly to structural builtins created by the government along racial lines…
In the black community, for example, schools are substandard, housing is substandard, health care and facilities are substandard, and policing services are not only substandard, but they are also a direct cause of parts of the community’s refusal to be a part of the consent between police and the community that makes policing work.
Here are some alarming facts according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
https://mikebeckles.com/trump-invokes-the-5th-at-tish-james-office-but-wait-what/
♦ African American students are less likely than white students to access college-ready courses. In fact, in 2011-12, only 57 percent of black students had access to a full range of math and science courses necessary for college readiness, compared to 81 percent of Asian American students and 71 percent of white students.
♦ Even when black students do have access to honors or advanced placement courses, they are vastly underrepresented in these courses. Black and Latino students represent 38 percent of students in schools that offer AP courses, but only 29 percent of students enrolled in at least one AP course. Black and Latino students also have less access to gifted and talented education programs than white students.
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♦African American students are often located in schools with less qualified teachers, teachers with lower salaries, and novice teachers.
♦ Research has shown evidence of systematic bias in teacher expectations for African American students, and non-black teachers were found to have lower expectations of black students than black teachers.
♦ African American students are less likely to be college-ready. In fact, 61 percent of ACT-tested black students in the 2015 high school graduating class met none of the four ACT college readiness benchmarks, nearly twice the 31 percent rate for all students.
https://mikebeckles.com/donald-trump-poisoned-the-country-but-most-importantly-perhaps-he-poisoned-the-federal-judiciary/
♦ Black students spend less time in the classroom due to discipline, which further hinders their access to quality education. Black students are nearly two times as likely to be suspended without educational services as white students. Black students are also 3.8 times as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions as white students. In addition, black children represent 19 percent of the nation’s pre-school population, yet 47 percent of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. In comparison, white students represent 41 percent of pre-school enrollment but only 28 percent of those receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. Even more troubling, black students are 2.3 times as likely to receive a referral to law enforcement or be subject to a school-related arrest as white students.
https://mikebeckles.com/samuel-alito-gloats-chastised-foreign-leaders-after-overturning-roe/
These are not accidental facts; they are well thought out, well-executed strategies designed to disrupt and deny black students’ progress, with the ultimate goal of directing our young people into the prison industrial complex.
In her riveting book titled “The New Jim Crow,” Attorney, Author, Activist, and Academic Michelle Alexander lays out succinctly how this dastardly system criminalizes young black children, particularly males.
Young black men who are subjected to the foregone are at tremendous risk of ending up ensnared in the trap of the for-profit prison industrial complex.
The result is fathers removed from black homes, subjecting their children to the full raft of negative consequences associated with that trauma.
This results in a continuous cycle of negativity, the type that has plagued the African American community since after Reconstruction, the period after slavery when the laws of the second act of slavery were designed.
Crime in the Black community that is decried, politicized, and racialized is a construct; it is not accidental. It is merely one of the results of deep planning, the same we are witnessing today in voting and other areas by the political right.
https://mikebeckles.com/texas-police-were-looking-for-teen-suspects-but-they-instead-detained-a-black-couple-in-their-50s-and-60s-at-gunpoint-lawsuit-says/
The Reconstruction era was a period in American history following the American Civil War; it lasted from 1865 to 1877.
The Compromise of 1877 was an informal agreement between southern Democrats and allies of the Republican Rutherford Hayes to settle the result of the 1876 presidential election and marked the end of the Reconstruction era.
Immediately after the presidential election of 1876, it became clear that the outcome of the race hinged largely on disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina–the only three states in the South with Reconstruction-era Republican governments still in power. As a bipartisan congressional commission debated over the outcome early in 1877, allies of the Republican Party candidate Rutherford Hayes met in secret with moderate southern Democrats in order to negotiate acceptance of Hayes’ election.
The Democrats agreed not to block Hayes’ victory on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from the South, thus consolidating Democratic control over the region. As a result of the so-called Compromise of 1877 (or Compromise of 1876), Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina became Democratic once again, effectively bringing an end to the Reconstruction era. (History.com)
https://mikebeckles.com/louisiana-attorney-general-drops-charges-against-aaron-bowman-a-black-man-arrested-after-being-struck-18-times-with/
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
By the 1870s, support was waning for the racially egalitarian policies of Reconstruction, a series of laws put in place after the Civil War to protect the rights of African Americans, especially in the South. Many southern whites had resorted to intimidation and violence to keep blacks from voting and restore white supremacy in the region.
I will stop here; suffice to say that as we witness a near-total disintegration of rights and freedoms in the United States as people of color, let us revisit two concepts, (1) the idea that we are making progress, that we must be patient for the time when all people are treated equally, and (2) Dr. Martin Luther King’s charge to be wary of what he called the tranquil drug of gradualism.
The sons and daughters of slavers, rapists, and murderers are not about to suddenly become great people. Believe they will have at your own peril.
https://mikebeckles.com/another-unarmed-black-man-murdered-by-police-his-crime-shoplifting/
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Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.