Why Police Kill Black People “The Whole Story”
Originally written July 9, 2016
I Was Challenged To “Tell The Whole Story”
In the aftermath of 2 horrific viral videos that showed 2 African American men, Alton Sterling & Philando Castille, die after being shot and killed by police officers this past week I took to Facebook and Twitter with my disgust and outrage at a system that I believe hurts both people and police. In one of my posts I shared a picture of a statistic from a Washington Post article that said: “Although black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year”.
A woman replied to me with this comment:
“What you’re also not telling people is what percentage of blacks kill blacks what percentage of blacks use guns what percentage of blacks commit what percent of the crime which explains why there is such a high percentage of black men under 30 that are incarcerated you have to tell the whole story”
So it is from that comment that I take the challenge to “tell the whole story” about why such a high rate of African American men under 30 are incarcerated and killed by police in America.
But before I do I have a challenge for you. I challenge you to read all of it with an objective mind. I challenge you to suspend your beliefs and assumptions. I challenge you to put aside any discomfort you may feel and read all of it and to explore the references that I share over the next few days, weeks, and months. I challenge you to suspend your desire to be right. I challenge you to think really deeply about why you did not learn these things in a “history” class. And finally, I challenge you to accept that I have no “agenda”.
I am an apolitical “systems thinker”. I believe in authentic dialogue and compromise during conflict resolution, not debates. My goal is not to win an argument, it is to put forth my best thinking with the hopes that others can build on it. I did my best to find credible sources that provide empirical research and data. If you find that a resource I shared is not credible please provide me with an alternative credible resource to support your point of view.
I took a doctorate level course a few years ago where I was introduced to the concept of “Systems Thinking”. There is a strong chance that what I am about to share will not make sense to you if you do not understand systems thinking. Here is a reference that summarizes the concept. Focus on the section that describes the difference between being a systems thinker vs. an events based thinker.
Also, note that I am a man who is passionate about seeing this country truly unite as One Nation…Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for ALL.
Now back to the challenge that I’ve been presented with…
First, we must all acknowledge that there are some things that we just don’t know or understand. There are 4 stages of learning: Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. For the majority of my life, the information that I am about to share fell into the unconscious incompetence category for me. Unconscious Incompetence means: You don’t know what you don’t know or you don’t see the need to learn something because you do not consider it a need.
There are 2 things that I think ALL Americans would agree on 1. Racism is taught 2. Parental guidance has a huge impact on a child’s development. So let’s start with how Racism was first taught…
The Creation of Race
In the 1600s European scientists began using pseudo-science to conclude that “white people” were a superior “race” of people. They used stereotypes that became widely believed social truths to support their theories that were later debunked by scientists in the early 1900’s however by that time it was too late. The damage had already been done and the forces that would later lead to systemic racism, dehumanization, mistrust, and fear of people of African descent in America had been set into motion.
European & African Slaves
When slavery first started in America both enslaved Europeans and Africans were indentured servants who served their term and were freed. Things soon changed however for Africans and a law was passed that forced them into slavery for life. Initially, poor Europeans, free Africans, and enslaved Africans worked alongside one another and were equal socially. They formed allegiances and supported one another. The elite class of slave owners, businessmen, and politicians didn’t like this so they introduced Racism to divide them. It worked.
The Origins and Purpose of Policing
It wasn’t until well after the Revolutionary War, in the 1830s, that policing in America expanded from an informal community watch volunteer model to the form of policing we see today. This was done as a means to control and intimidate the poor as larger cities started to form and the economic class divide was becoming more evident. After the Civil War policing in the south was created to intimidate, control, and brutalize freed Africans. The slave catchers and overseers that maintained “order” (beatings, killings, lynchings, rape) during slavery became police officers that enacted the same type of “order” for the next 100 years during the Jim Crow era. With the police being an all Euro American organization fueled by classism and racism created to protect the interests of the elite class, most African Americans had 2 strikes against them from birth. They were both poor and African.
Slavery Ends
After slavery ended, Racism did not. At the end of the Civil War, the viscous forces of Racism and Poverty were set in motion that would stifle economic progress and the obtainment of Liberty and Happiness for millions of Americans of African descent who are descendants of enslaved Africans. Also, what often isn’t mentioned is the mental, emotional, and psychological trauma that enslaved African’s endured and the PTSD (post-traumatic slave syndrome) passed down to future generations. When they were freed they never received any therapy or counseling. They were promised 40 acres and a mule to help them get started financially and they never received it. Dr. Joy Degruys book and lectures on this topic helped me to understand why there is so much trauma-induced internalized and externalized anger and hatred within so many African American people.
Slavery By Another Name
A few years back I watched a documentary on PBS based on a book titled “Slavery By Another Name” that made me want to cry. It answered so many questions for me about why so many African American families have yet to break the cycle of poverty. After all their ancestors endured during slavery, the next generation had to endure this…
“In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon (Pulitzer Prize recipient) brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history — when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World War II. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations — including U.S. Steel Corp. — looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.”
This went on until the 1940s. To provide historical context, my paternal grandparents were 20 years old in 1940.
What About Crime In African American Communities?
The second thing that I assumed that ALL Americans could agree on is the importance that parental guidance plays in the lives of children. Studies show that 70 percent of the children of people who are imprisoned will end up in jail too.
“So what becomes of these children whose mother and/or fathers are locked up? Often, they are left to fend for themselves emotionally and the stress of child-rearing falls on a grandmother, usually, or another surrogate parent or the children may end up in protective services. These hardships manifest in the children in mental health issues like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and feelings of abandonment said psychotherapist Dr. Janice Beal.”
The results of the heinous crimes of humanity outlined throughout this article have implications that are still hurting many African Americans today.
Hurt people, hurt people.
The mostly gang-related murders that we see in urban cities across America are a direct result of everything I’ve outlined thus far. It is mostly emotionally unstable and abandoned teenagers committing these murders. Even with that said please note that this study from the US Dept of Justice shows that poor African Americans and poor European Americans had almost equal violent crime rates with poor European Americans being slightly higher.
Personal Responsibility
Statistics show that the typical European American person has 13 times more wealth than the typical African American person. I’ve heard many people say that it’s because too many African American people lack the personal responsibility needed to make their situation better. I’ve heard that “after slavery ended everyone was free and had a fair chance to succeed”. Many Euro American people will accurately tell you that their families didn’t own slaves or weren’t in this country during that time and that slavery had nothing to do with their families progressing.
What many of them may not know is that they may have benefited from and received advantages due to racist housing policies up until the end of the 1960’s that aided millions of working-class Euro Americans to ascend into the middle class and create a foundation of middle-class stability. And for some, wealth that their families leverage to create various opportunities for themselves and for generations to come.
Let’s look at two examples, the Homestead Act and the FHA.
“The Homestead Act was signed into law by Lincoln in May 1862 and it remained in place until 1934. By the end of the Act, more than 270 million acres of land had been transferred to individuals, almost all of whom were white for little more than a filing fee. Thus, by essentially giving away land to white individuals and white-owned businesses, the Homestead Acts were the most extensive, radical, redistributive governmental policy in American history. The number of original (1862) Homestead-recipient descendants living in the year 2000 was estimated to be around forty-six million people, about a quarter of the U.S. adult population.”
And it didn’t end there.
After 1934 many of the remaining poor Euro American’s used Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to buy their way out of government housing projects to move to brand new middle-class suburban subdivisions. This subsidized home-buying boom led to one of the broadest expansions of the American middle class ever, almost exclusively to the benefit of Euro American families. The F.H.A.’s explicitly racist underwriting standards, which rated African American and integrated neighborhoods as uninsurable, made federally insured home loans largely unavailable to African American home seekers. Ninety-eight percent of these loans made between 1934 and 1968 went to Euro Americans.
Homeownership has long been the key to creating stability and wealth in America. Many Euro American’s were given an unfair advantage during this era and today when African Americans demand reparations or equal opportunities at jobs in certain industries many of us are told that we want handouts. I’ve never heard a Euro American with this stance mention the handouts that their grandparents and parents may have received. Housing discrimination was legal until 1968.
To provide historical context, my parents were 18 years old and my paternal grandparents were 48 years old in 1968.
Post Racial America
Many people rejoiced that we had arrived and finally got past Racism in 2008 when President Barack Obama was elected. Many believed that this proved that equality in America was finally achieved. They were wrong.
“As the United States celebrates its “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of black men in major urban areas are under correctional control or saddled with criminal records for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an extraordinary percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in a parallel social universe, denied basic civil and human rights — including the right to vote; the right to serve on juries; and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. Today, it is no longer socially permissible to use race explicitly as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet as civil-rights-lawyer-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander demonstrates, it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Written in 2010, The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to permanent second-class status — denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.”
It is impossible to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” if you are denied access to society because you have a criminal record because of a poor choice you made when you were an angry unstable teenager acting out the Post Traumatic Stress/Slave syndrome that you never received therapy for because you grew up in poverty with incarcerated parents. Parents who also grew up with PTSD in poverty with incarcerated parents because their fathers were never around because they were picked up in Alabama for a petty crime in 1925 and illegally forced back into slavery for a corporation that is thriving as a multinational billion-dollar corporation today. Please ponder this realistic hypothetical scenario long and hard.
So, if the police were created to police the poor…if racism is taught and creates implicit bias…and the overwhelming majority of African Americans are still fighting their way out of poverty while facing all of the generational roadblocks that I outlined above…could it quite possibly make sense to you that most African American people continue to fight an uphill battle in this country that leads to poor African Americans being disproportionately targeted by law enforcement?
In closing, I hope that I’ve done a good job of presenting you with evidence and facts that illustrate a story of how race, systemic racism, slavery, mental trauma, forced poverty, intentional discrimination & unfairness, and the dehumanization of African Americans in this country for the last 400 years can lead to a cycle of crime and imprisonment that still haunts far too many today.
The fact of the matter is this…the reason that African American men under the age of 30 make up the majority of the prison population in America is because the systems of Racism, Poverty, and Policing were designed to produce that outcome.
I’ll conclude by saying this…
Throughout American history, many European Americans have been responsible for creating pain, death, and trauma for many African Americans. It’s a painful fact to process for some but it’s true.
Please know that I don’t want you to feel guilty. I don’t blame you for the past. I’m not angry at all Euro American people. I’m angry at the Euro American leaders from the past who allowed this system of Racism and Poverty to exist for so long and to hurt so many people. Presently, I’m angry at any American from any ethnicity who rejects to support people who are asking for equality and justice. The very thing that this country was founded on.
I just want you to acknowledge that, yes, these things did take place and, yes, because of implicit bias and hidden history you may not have known that the terror that impacted previous generations very much so still impacts us overall as African Americans today.
I know that you and I can’t change the past, but for those of you who continue to deflect the pain of the African American people who attempt to articulate what we have experienced or imply that they are making it up or being manipulated by the left, media, democrats, Hollywood, etc. you are literally picking up the torch from those who committed the evils done in the past. Is that the side of history you want to be on? Stop trying to rationalize away our pain. Remember, there are some things that you just don’t know…that you don’t know.
If you are pro-love and pro-solutions simply ask, “how can I help fix it?”, while showing empathy and acknowledging that our pain is real.
Thanks for reading,
Dr. Sundiata Soon-Jahta
Show Love
CashApp: $DrSundiata; Venmo:@DrSundiata; Zelle:dr.sundiata@gmail.com
This was written in 2016 when I was hosting a podcast called Race Haven: Solutions Focused Dialogue About Race Relations In America. I now host the Theory of Indivisibility podcast. You can find links to both shows here.
