Stay Woke. Candis Watts Smith
letter by writing, “Black people. I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives Matter.” Patrisse Cullors, her friend, put a hashtag on it, and Opal Tometi helped to build a network of folks who wanted to unite under that message: #BlackLivesMatter.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has become known as one that is primarily concerned with police brutality, but it is actually one that is broadly concerned with raising awareness of ongoing racial disparities, developing empathy for Black life, and ending anti-Black racism. Since the development of the hashtag, many other organizations have joined to develop a united front under the moniker the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL)—which consists of about four dozen local and national organizations such as the Black Youth Project 100, Mothers Against Police Brutality, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and BLM as well. While the focus of these organizations is on Black lives, the founders of the BLM movement assert, “when Black people get free, everybody gets free.”12
AVERAGES, ANECDOTES, AND OUTLIERS
As social scientists, we aim to paint portraits of society that are not as detailed as Kehinde Wiley’s but also not as interpretive as Jackson Pollock’s. In order to find a happy medium, we rely on “averages,” central tendencies, or what is “most common.” We might use words like “many” or “most” almost synonymously with “on average.” Average describes what you are most likely to see in this world.
Sometimes, you will read something, and think, “That cannot be true because I once knew a guy who . . .” This is an anecdote. An anecdote relies on one case, perhaps illustrative, but it does not carry the weight of an average. “Averages” rely on many, sometimes hundreds, thousands, or even millions of cases. We rely on data from large opinion polls, nationally representative surveys, peer-reviewed journals and books, and even the US Census Bureau to make claims throughout this book. We provide facts rooted in data.
Sometimes, you will read something and think, “This cannot be true because Obama was elected . . . twice!” Yes, Obama, Oprah, LeBron James, and Beyoncé are phenomenal. But they are what we call outliers. These people represent exceptions to the rule and do not represent the average, everyday person. Some people achieve beyond our wildest dreams, but many people do not or cannot because of compounding inequality. In other words, there are other people who can do what these people can do, but most of us cannot and do not because we are average.
Most Americans agree that racism still exists in the United States, but many people have a narrow understanding of what racism is. This makes sense. There are various interests involved in making a particular definition of racism dominant. For example, the leaders and participants of the civil rights movement made an effort to define racism as systemic and institutional, but the Nixon administration only a few years later was able to narrow this definition to one of overt intention to discriminate on the basis of race.13 While there is some overlap between the two conceptualizations, two individuals each relying on a different definition of racism will probably never come to a shared conclusion about how to eradicate racism and its progeny. Being cognizant of the cacophony of definitions of racism with which Americans are faced helps us, as educators, to realize how difficult it is for students of antiracism to separate misinformation and disinformation from an otherwise-complex reality.
Typically, when people think of racism, they think of Jim Crow, lynchings, police with dogs, the N-word, and other overt behaviors and attitudes.14 That is an accurate depiction of a type of racism, but racism also exists in other, more covert and enduring forms, which we call structural racism. Structural racism refers to the fact that political, economic, social, and even psychological benefits are disproportionately provided to some racial groups while disadvantages are doled out to other racial groups in a systematic way. In the United States, this has resulted in white Americans having greater political, economic, social, and psychological benefits, on average, while people of color have more political, economic, social, and psychological disadvantages, on average. Nobody needs to do anything with bad intentions for structural racism to persist, but people across racial groups can intentionally or unintentionally assist in perpetuating racial inequalities. The thing about structural racism is that it is embedded in our everyday affairs, making it difficult to see if you do not know what you are looking for. Consequently, it is unclear to some people why such a Movement for Black Lives needs to exist.
In the remainder of this chapter, we provide a slew of data that illuminates the ways in which Black citizens find themselves at risk in various domains of life in the United States. We start with the most contentious: policing and the criminal justice system. Then we move to highlight racial disparities in more mundane areas of our lives: housing, education, wealth, health, and employment. We hope that by presenting the evidence across various areas of society, the fact that Black lives are consistently marginalized becomes clearer.
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Police, Crime, and Justice
Many people, including a number of the movement’s supporters, believe the Black Lives Matter movement is primarily focused on the police and police brutality. To be sure, it is the protests against such violence that made Black Lives Matter a household name. While this social movement is assuredly concerned with broader conceptions of the way that Black people are marginalized and contend with violence in US society, its attention to policing has been so impactful because it is a domain where people can point to individuals, policies, and patterns of behaviors across police departments to show that something is wrong and has been wrong for some time. An understandable ire arises from knowing that “there was [a] lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. [Over a century later, it’s] been estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days.”15
The historian Russell Rickford explains,
By confronting racist patterns of policing, Black Lives Matter is addressing a reality that touches the lives of a wide segment of people of color. Structural racism in the post-segregation era generally has lacked unambiguous symbols of apartheid around which a popular movement could cohere. Yet mass incarceration and the techniques of racialized policing on which it depends—“broken windows,” stop-and-frisk, “predictive policing,” and other extreme forms of surveillance—have exposed the refurbished, but no less ruthless, framework of white supremacy.16
Unlike overt racial bigotry and racially discriminatory Jim Crow–era laws, structural racism, as we see it play out today, has a “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t,”17 elusive quality to it. Prior to the civil rights movement, folks could point to racial bigots in their legislature and racist laws in state constitutions; but today laws are written in a racially neutral way, and political leaders have become deft in their use of dog whistle politics, making it more difficult for many people to directly identify sources of racially disparate outcomes. However, when you see several videos of unarmed Black people shot by police officers across the country, in contrast to videos of police peacefully deescalating conflicts with armed white people, it is difficult to suggest that everything is kumbaya.
Timetables of injustice, one century apart.
Although there are no comprehensive national data on police killings, there are a great deal of data about the ways in which Black (and Latinx and increasingly Muslim and Arab) people are treated differently not only by the police but by the criminal justice system more generally (and thus more pervasively). A lot of this begins with initial interactions with police. Policies such as “stop-and-frisk” increase the chances of Black and Brown people interacting with the police. At the most basic level, Terry stops, or stop-and-frisks, allow police to stop people on the basis of a reasonable suspicion of involvement with criminal activity. On its face, this policy is race-neutral, but the evidence shows that police use race in their execution of the policy. In 2011, New York City carried out nearly seven hundred thousand stop-and-frisk searches. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) reported that only 11 percent of stops in New York City “were based on