As discussed on Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/...
According to a recent study, the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his killer is not unique. In "Operation Ghetto Storm," the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) found at least 136 unarmed African Americans were killed by police, security guards and self-appointed vigilantes in 2012. Overall, one black person was killed in an extrajudicial shooting every 28 hours.
Those who don't, or refuse to, understand have been point the arrow away as the furor over Trayvon's killing, and then the verdict have rolled out. Why don't you talk about "Black on Black Crime", why don't you talk about "Teen Pregnancy"?
Well, frankly we have talked about those issues and they have complex roots that aren't so easy to rip out. We know black men are targeted by police out of proportion to their actual level of crime, that they are arrested and prosecuted to a greater degree and longer amounts for the same offenses. This can in turn help foreclose their ability to lead productive lives or to effectively raise a family.
We know this.
But the fact that we're actually having yet another Trayvon happening everyday - every 28 hours? And that although there will probably be an arrests and a conviction in many of those "Black on Black" Crimes - there won't be when it comes to these.
This is what the Zimmerman Fans don't get. People were upset with Trayvon because they know he's a long way from the only one. Now we can see just how deep the iceberg of death goes.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Kali Akuno, a longtime organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, author of Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities. His organization’s report is called "Operation Ghetto Storm," documenting the extrajudicial killing of 313 black people in 2012. Michelle Alexander is still with us, author of The New Jim Crow.
It’s great to have you both with us. Kali Akuno, very quickly, just go through what you found.
KALI AKUNO: What we found is that this practice of extrajudicial killings is very systematic throughout the country. We found that police officers rarely—or the security guards or those who are deputized, such as George Zimmerman—are rarely, if ever, persecuted for the crimes that they commit, for the killings that they commit. And we found that overwhelmingly—as you mentioned some of the figures, overwhelmingly, most of the folks who were killed do not have any weapons. And the main reason—even 47 percent of those who were killed, the reasoning that was offered by the police is that they felt threatened—and so, a very similar argument that you hear in the Zimmerman case. And this was very systematic.
And we also found that—313 is what we could definitely verify, but we believe that this is an undercount. And this is primarily because the police, how they document these killings, oftentimes in many states there is no race designated. But what you can do is look at the geographic area and kind of make some summaries. But the federal government really is not compiling this information, and not many people are trying to compile this information, so there is a pretty significant gap in terms of, you know, the cold reality, if we want to look at and desegregate it by race, of what’s actually taking place in our communities.
On this they are correct. The FBI doesn't provide a racial breakdown of crime stats on anything except
1 on 1 murders. (On which btw, there are actually
more total Murders by White on White Crime (2,630), than there are Black on Black (2,447), although I could be noted that those numbers are fairly close it's not exactly like everyone White or everyone Black are equally prone to kill. If we were to truly understand the question of "who is more dangerous" educational, employment, poverty and environmental stress issues should fact in, and we do know that most of those areas Black
are vastly over-represented)
And that Black-White wealth-gap is getting wider.
As of 2010, white families, on average, earned about $2 for every $1 that black and Hispanic families earned, a ratio that has remained roughly constant for the last 30 years. But when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.
The dollar value of that gap has grown, as well. By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.
The core of the wealth loss has been of course, the Housing crash which - you guessed it -disproportionate targeted minorities.
http://www.aclu.org/...
Pricing discrimination — illegally charging minority customers more for loans and other services than similarly qualified whites are charged — is a longstanding problem. It grew to outrageous proportions during the bubble years. Studies by consumer advocates found that large numbers of minority borrowers who were eligible for affordable, traditional loans were routinely steered toward ruinously priced subprime loans that they would never be able to repay.
Quote literally, their wealth was
stolen from them, pushing those who had climbed out of poverty, back into it.
And poverty itself is especially pernicious as another study shows that being born poor can generates worse outcomes than being exposed to cocaine and crack before birth.
“Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,” said Hallam Hurt, former chair of neonatology at Albert Einstein Medical Center. In the late 1980s, Hurt and her colleagues became alarmed at the number of new mothers they were seeing who were addicted to cheap, smokable “crack” cocaine.
...
“We went looking for the effects of cocaine,” Hurt said to the Enquirer. But after a time, she said, “we began to ask, ‘Was there something else going on?’”
By the time the children in Hurt’s study were seven years old, “81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside.” Children with higher exposures to violence suffered from anxiety, depression and low self-esteem in addition to developmental delays.
So it seems that poverty itself, is more dangerous than drugs. Or out of wed-lock births.
If the data is correct and the number of African-Americans killed - due to being considered Robbery or Burglary or Drug Dealers - via "Justifiable Homicide" is indeed 313? That's chilling because these are the FBI Justifiable Homicide Numbers by police and or private citizens for the last several years.
Year Police Citizen
2007 398 252
2008 378 265
2009 414 266
2010 397 285
2011 393 260
With these numbers nearly 50% of these "Justified" Killings were of Black Men, and about 47% of those Were Unarmed.
We said after the Trayvon verdict it was 'Open Season" on young black men? No, it's been the Killing Season for quite some time.
And most of the time, no one will be held accountable.
Vyan
While you're pondering that Join Color of Change Campaign to Repeal Stand Your Ground Laws and get your asses Registered to Vote [Share the QR below], because at certain point - as I said before - we have to start thinking what happens #AfterTrayvon
