Young males in poorer black communities can also fall prey to the trappings of a prescribed form of masculinity that thrives in these subcultures: one in which using violence to defend your reputation is seen as acceptable and sometimes necessary. Men in these environments – gangs, particularly – are often considered weak by their peers if they fail to defend their honour or respond to a slight, the consequences of which can be disastrous. Ironically, the ability to reason oneself out of conflict or to avoid it altogether would be applauded outside of the subculture, but is often seen within the community as cowardice. And the rewards within the subculture – respect, and attractiveness to women – are hard to refuse, especially if escaping the subculture is not seen as a possibility, which makes it pretty difficult to bring about a change in behaviour.
The revolving door
For many black men, this route leads to only one destination: in America especially there is a revolving door from the classroom to the prison cell. Mass incarceration has reached epic proportions, with one in three black men imprisoned at some point during their lives.* This has big implications for their futures; the ramifications of a criminal record can be catastrophic for employment prospects and, once the step along the criminal justice path has been taken, it’s near impossible to turn back.
When it comes to the American criminal justice system, the odds are stacked against you if you are black. A 2016 report by The National Registry of Exonerations found that 47% of all wrongful convictions involved black defendants. The figures for serious crimes such as murder show that black defendants account for 40% of those convicted, but 50% of those wrongfully convicted (in comparison to whites, who account for 36 percent of those wrongfully convicted for murder). It’s a similar picture with sexual assault: 59% of all exonerees were black defendants, compared with 34% for white defendants†.
As well as falling victim to police brutality disproportionately, US blacks are also more likely to be victims of police misconduct, such as ‘hiding evidence, tampering with witnesses or perjury’. This may also have contributed to the aforementioned racial disparity; the report concluded that black defendants accounted for 76% of wrongful murder convictions where police misconduct was involved, in comparison to 63% of white exonerees*.
50%: the percentage by which US prison populations would decline if African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated in the same proportion as white people.†
Ava DuVernay’s powerful BAFTA-winning Netflix documentary 13th chronicles how the abolition of slavery and the subsequent exploitation of the 13th Amendment, which deemed it unconstitutional to hold a person as a slave, have led to more black men being locked up now than there ever were during slavery. On the surface, the 13th Amendment seemed honourable and straightforward enough. But there was a loophole that excluded ‘criminals’, and so began the hyper-criminalization of the black male as a means of maintaining the free labour that had been so easily available during the years of slavery. Fast forward to today, and this loophole has morphed to fit the times: from the Jim Crow laws of segregation, to mandatory sentencing and Nixon’s ‘war on drugs’, Reagan’s ‘war on crime’, and, more recently, Clinton’s ‘Three-Strikes Law’; 150 years of systematic discriminatory policy-making has led us to the black male mass-incarceration epidemic in the US today.
American lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson has spent the best part of three decades fighting to highlight the plight of those caught in the crosshairs of the US criminal justice system, and he argues that at the crux of the problem is how we treat the marginalized and dispossessed:
Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. Finally, I’ve come to believe that the true measure of our commitment to justice, the character of our society, our commitment to the rule of law, fairness, and equality cannot be measured by how we treat the rich, the powerful, the privileged, and the respected among us. The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavoured, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.*
Stevenson also states that the criminal justice system unfairly favours those who are ‘rich and guilty’ over those who are ‘poor and innocent’ – after all, the poor can’t afford a good defence lawyer. It seems prison-for-profit is a very lucrative business, and is now a booming industry – it pays to send people to prison. One of the final acts of the Obama administration was to issue a memo to bring an end to the Justice Department’s reliance on private prisons (which now account for approximately 18 per cent of US federal prisons – a figure that is steadily increasing). The memo, issued by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, cited more ‘safety and security incidents’ in private prisons than public ones as the reason for this change in policy. Unfortunately, a month after Trump took the Oval Office his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, rescinded this and announced a reinstatement of private prisons.
This, coupled with the fact that a whopping 90–95 per cent of prisoners accept a plea bargain and never go to trial,† has created a system where poor people of colour are disproportionately incarcerated. This is not only ethically wrong, but also in the long term it is economically insane. To discard one-third of all black males when they are in their prime and most able to contribute to society is a cataclysmic dent in the moral, social, and economic fabric of America.
Yes, we can!
Clearly, this is by no means the story of every black male. The majority will play by rules that are stacked against them and will seek inclusion, complete their education, and make sacrifices in order to achieve this by going the extra mile, conforming to a mainstream culture, and focusing on presenting an acceptable and ‘unthreatening’ outward appearance, harbouring dreams that this will help people to focus on the content of their character as opposed to their colour.
Having lived in America for eight years, I consider it my second home – and a paradox. In one country, we see dreams and aspirations realised that would be impossible anywhere else. But we also see that the fear and division present at the birth of the nation remains.
For me, the election of the first African American president was a watershed in American and global history akin to the election of Nelson Mandela. I count myself privileged to have played a small civic part in the Obama election campaign, canvassing on the eve of the election in Virginia – a deep red Republican state that had not been blue since Lyndon B Johnson’s (LBJ) victory in 1964. And even though LBJ won the state back then, many white residents in Virginia were against his landmark civil rights legislation and had wanted to keep segregation after that point. Virginia would never again be a true-blue state. Or so it seemed.
I had flown out to Virginia with my friends, Labour party strategists Margaret McDonagh and Anji Hunter. At campaign headquarters, I was struck by an elderly white gentleman whose face was badly bruised. Feeling concerned, I walked over to check if he was okay and asked how he had injured himself. With a voice full of emotion, this southern gentleman revealed to me that he was in his nineties and owned a farm that had been in his family for generations. He had fallen over a few days before and had hurt his face on a rake. But, against doctor’s orders, he was determined to come and support the Obama campaign efforts.
He explained to me how, as a young man, he had been an ardent segregationist and saw this as a route to some sort of redemption. He never thought he would live to see an African American President, but felt he needed to actively support Obama in order to right some of the wrong doings of his past. After speaking to this gentleman, I felt something momentous was about to happen. That evening, Margaret and I attended the final Obama rally in Virginia. It was a cool, crisp night and the atmosphere was electric as we all sensed history was about to be made.
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