No one lives forever, but some of us are living quite a bit less than others.
Consider life expectancy by race (Black:White inequities) and gender from 1900 to 2011. Although it has improved for all race/ethnicity and gender groups for the past 111 years, Black men continue to have substantially lower life expectancy at birth than Black women and White women and men (Figure 1a).1 In 1900, the estimated life expectancy for White men was 46.6 years; for non-White men it was 43.5 years; for White women it was 48.7 years, and for non-White women it was 33.5 years. By 2011, the life expectancy for White men was 76.6 years; for Black men it was 72.2 years; for White women it was 81.1 years; and for Black women it was 78.2 years. For both genders, the relative difference in life expectancy declined from a high of 34% in 1900 to a low of 4% in 2011 (Figure 1b). Relative differences in life expectancy declined at a steady rate until 1960, then plateauing for males and females until 1990. The plateau in relative ratios for men probably reflects an increase in mortality from homicide and HIV for young to middle-aged Black men.
With higher rates of obesity, hypertension and other factors, black people are at greater risk from CoronaVirus.
Why are African American communities at added risk for the coronavirus?
I think the biggest challenge is the fact that people of color, African Americans, start out with health outcomes that are disproportionately poor when compared to white Americans. The highest risk, if you get this disease, is to someone 60 or older with chronic disease. With African Americans, you start with a population that is disproportionately sicker, and if it gets exposed, it will have a higher death rate.
Why is our at-risk population for the virus starting out more sick?
The reasons for the health inequities include access to health care, and differences in the quality of care African Americans receive. A lot of what makes you healthy happens outside the doctor’s office, so all the social determinants – including racism and discrimination, housing, access to transportation and education – are a factor. And I’ll say differences in individual behaviors that we all have based on our life experiences.
And on top of all that, we have to worry about murderous cops and crazed white people too.
The death of 46-year-old George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has captured the nation in a way that is reminiscent of Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Grey, Oscar Grant, John Crawford III, Alton Sterling and Philando Castille. This has happened before, it will happen again. Yet again, we will see the complete disregard for human suffering by a man with a badge. Yet again, we will see the callous, cold, calculated manner in which the officer held his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes while he gasped for breath and help until he ultimately lost consciousness and died.
What you’re seeing in that cell phone video — is a murder. It’s a snuff film.
It’s a lynching.
Right there in 1080p HD.
It’s blatant. It’s direct. But what’s most shocking about it is how casual the officer is. He’s completely nonchalant as he chokes the life out of a fellow human being. It’s almost like he’s done this before, or something very much like it.
Another video that has been released shows that Floyd didn’t resist, he didn’t fight back. He had already been handcuffed for several minutes while he sat against a wall. How did we get to him face-down with a knee on his neck? How did we get to him even being arrested for passing a bad $20 bill? Normally, that would be a citation.
Better check what you have in your wallet, you might wind up face-down too. Well, depending on who you are.
Chances are that if you are white, nothing like this would ever happen to you. And you know that right? You know that the police are your friend. They’re your servants. They do you bidding.
If you’re a white woman in the park with her dog off its leash, you know that you can call 9-1-1 and tell them the black man asking you to put your dog on a leash is attacking and threatening you, don’t cha? You know you can cry and play victim right? You have the power, he is powerless.
You know that he just might get the Michael Brown special. Serves him right.
And you know sometimes you can just skip the cops and take matters into your own hands. Grab a gun, or a shotgun, and chase down the black man jogging through your neighborhood — where he obviously doesn’t belong — and take care of business.
You don’t have to worry about your dad’s buddies in the DA’s office, they’re on your side. You don’t have to worry about the police, you don’t have to worry about a thing. You’re home free.
This goes back a long way. It goes back to Rodney King. It goes back to the Exonerated Five. It goes back to Leonard Deadweiler. It goes back to Emmet Till. It goes back to the Scotsboro Boys. It goes back to the Slave Patrols.
When one thinks about policing in early America, there are a few images that may come to mind: A county sheriff enforcing a debt between neighbors, a constable serving an arrest warrant on horseback, or a lone night watchman carrying a lantern through his sleeping town. These organized practices were adapted to the colonies from England and formed the foundations of American law enforcement. However, there is another significant origin of American policing that we cannot forget—and that is slave patrols.
The American South relied almost exclusively on slave labor and white Southerners lived in near constant fear of slave rebellions disrupting this economic status quo. As a result, these patrols were one of the earliest and most prolific forms of early policing in the South. The responsibility of patrols was straightforward—to control the movements and behaviors of enslaved populations. According to historian Gary Potter, slave patrols served three main functions.
“(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and, (3) to maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside the law.”[i]
As our metropolitan police forces were formed, they were inculcated with the perspective of the slave patrols. To chase down, apprehend and terrorize former slaves and their descendants. To keep things under control.
America committed a massive multigenerational crime against humanity with slavery and Jim Crow. Consciously and not, America knows this and to a certain extent, it remains, even now, in a state of constant fear of a massive post-slave uprising. At some point, at some time, the darkies are gonna demand their pound of flesh. They’re going to want retribution. Payback.
So they have to be kept under control. Kept in their place. Reminded that their lives are essentially worthless. Expendable.
This is the agenda. This is the plot. This is the problem. Listen to former Baltimore Police Officer Michael Wood Jr. explain how police can become a racist occupying force.
Michael explains how the police culture itself is corrupt and racist, how it leads young officers into the “us vs them" mentality and even officers who may not themselves cross the line would never lift a finger to stop someone who has. A true good cop is one who would stand up and stop a bad one. Unfortunately, there are hardly any good cops anymore, not even Michael who didn’t come out with some of the abuse he witnessed until after he had left the force. Another officer in his department, Detective Joe Crystal, had reported a case of abuse after a suspect had had his leg broken during a “payback” beating he received for breaking into the house of a policeman’s girlfriend. Crystal was ostracized and harassed, receiving a dead rat on his windshield. That’s how the rest of the police treat a good cop.
America has to reconcile it’s past and it’s present. It has to come to grips with what it’s done, and refocus itself on correcting the lingering damage and destruction it has wrought in the black community. America has to admit that it was wrong before it can become right.
We also need a federal law that makes assault and murder under the color of authority a crime.
Right now the FBI can only bring forth a civil rights case if they have clear and absolute proof that there were racial animus and bias motivation for the case. That’s a tall, difficult order unless the perpetrator openly admits their rationale. We need for them to be able to take on any murder or assault case by law enforcement because we can’t trust any police department to police its own members. We can’t have them investigated by their buddies and prosecuted by their pals. That simply doesn’t work. Of all the cases I listed early in this diary, only in the Walter Scott case was there a conviction for murder and that’s because he was filmed being shot in the back as he ran away. Caught red-handed.
That’s just one time out of the approximate 1000 times per year, according to the WaPo and the Guardian, that law enforcement kills citizens. And many of those citizens tend to be black.
Black males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year, according to data collected for The Counted, an effort by the Guardian to record every such death. They were also killed at four times the rate of young white men.
Racial disparities persisted in 2016 even as the total number of deaths caused by police fell slightly. In all, 1,091 deaths were recorded for 2016, compared with 1,146 logged in 2015. Several 2015 deaths only came to light last year, suggesting the 2016 number may yet rise.
The total is again more than twice the FBI’s annual number of “justifiable homicides” by police, counted in recent years under a voluntary system allowing police to opt out of submitting details of fatal incidents. Plans to improve the government records have been thrown into doubt by the election of Trump, who campaigned as a “law and order” conservative.
But actually, it’s worse than 1000 cases, it’s more like 2000 because there are additional cases where people die in jail — like Sandra Bland — long after their arrest.
Between June 1, 2015, and March 31, 2016, media reviews identified 1,348 potential arrest-related deaths. During this period, the number of deaths consistently ranged from 87 to 156 arrest-related deaths per month, with an average of 135 deaths per month. To confirm and collect more information about the 379 deaths identified through open sources from June to August 2015, BJS conducted a survey of law enforcement agencies and ME/C offices.
The survey findings identified 425 arrest-related deaths during this 3-month period—12% more than the number of deaths identified through the open source review. Extrapolated to a full calendar year, an estimated 1,900 arrest-related deaths occurred in 2015. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the deaths that occurred from June to August 2015 were homicides, about a fifth (18%) were suicides, and another tenth (11%) were accidents.
Obama and Holder tried to correct this by investigating 19 different police departments and implementing consent decrees using strategies and tactics drawn from the 21st Century Policing Project. Activists such as DeRay Mckessen and Sam Sinyangwe have continued that work with CampaignZero. Prosecuting these officers is only the beginning. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done here. We need to come to grips with quite a bit. We need to make some changes, we need to commit ourselves to a new form of equal justice.
The only question is: Are we up to it?