Hullabaloo

Sunday, March 03, 2013

 

Those pesky racial entitlements

by digby

McFadden's strip in the New York Times:

This would be a lot funnier if Justice Scalia were the only person in America who believed this.

The desire for racism is no longer an issue in American life is powerful for a lot of reasons, most of them good. But it's obvious that there are a lot of people who want to declare the problem solved before it's over out of resentment that they had to deal with it in the first place.

It should be obvious to anyone that the act of suppressing the African American vote is racist. And there is no doubt that the Republicans are doing that.

It should also be obvious that when you have a criminal justice system that throws out these statistics, that we have a problem with race:

• African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population
• African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
• Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population
• According to Unlocking America, if African American and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates of whites, today's prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50%
• One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime
• 1 in 100 African American women are in prison
• Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice). 

Drug Sentencing Disparities 

• About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans report using an illicit drug
• 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites
• African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.
• African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months). (Sentencing Project)

The fact that there are also some African Americans in high places does not change the fact that we stil have systemic racism in this country.  You just can't look at those numbers as come to any other conclusion.

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digby 3/03/2013 11:00:00 AM