What do we associate with African-Americans? Drugs? Gang violence? Petty theft? This association is called stereotyping.
Stereotyping: The association of certain attributes, mostly negative, to a certain community with no logical backup.
Narcotics is bad, but narcotics is abused at equal rates across communities. However, African-Americans are charged and jailed for drug abuse more. They further are more likely to be arrested and to get stricter sentences for petty crimes such as burglary, theft or robbery. Because we see more African-Americans convicted, we start thinking that these acts are integrated with the existence of African-Americans. This keeps going on as a cycle. In order to understand this cycle in-depth, we need to understand the concept of institutional racism.
Black people are less likely to get home loans. They live in impoverished areas, where investment is not very profitable for banks. Banks identified areas where they were more likely to get maximum return on their investment, and unsurprisingly found black neighborhoods to be unprofitable. This means that black communities have been historically cut off from funding, which eventually turned them into ghettos. This phenomenon is called redlining, and is now illegal.
Because black families cannot afford decent housing, living conditions are bad. Living conditions impact your ability to contribute. This means that corporations do not have an incentive to open branches in black communities. The jobs in these communities are sub-par. Due to low taxation, schools are heavily under-funded. Resource allocation is significantly lower in black schools. These people get sub-par education. If few of them do reach college, they cannot sustain. According to The Patriot Act, for every 85 college-going students, there is only one black person. African-Americans also make up most of the college-dropouts.
Because of the entire system, recruiters have a pre-made bias that African-Americans are just not good for the team. This means that they are less likely to get jobs. They are forced back into ghettos, despite their capabilities. Furthermore, police departments in southern states are still controlled by white supremacists. If a black person is suspected of a crime, they are more likely to never reach trial. Most African-American convicts die in shootouts. These law-enforcers have entrenched the idea that this community has a history of violence, a history that even if we consider is just, was still enforced by the racist mentalities. Furthermore, the US has a good bunch of private lockups who have an incentive to keep bringing in culprits in order to keep their funding intact. African-Americans are more likely to be victims here, because it’s always easier to blame the black guy.
We tend to remain in our bubbles. Bigots do not read news that tell them that bigotry is wrong. They only subscribe to media that supports their supremacy. This is why most red states are yet indifferent to black-killings. With every instance of a black man being charged, their biases grow stronger. With every instance of a non-black man being charged, their outrage grows, because they are unwilling to acknowledge that they have a bias-problem.
All these can be directly tied to this huge number of cases of police brutality against the blacks.
Police departments in the southern states are mostly filled with white supremacists.
Despite drug abuse being an equal problem across communities, black people are more likely to be tried and punished harsher for narcotics.
These cases get a lot of right-wing media attention. And this media attention further helps entrench the stereotypes against black communities.
Because of the history of red-lining, black communities have already been turned into ghettos. Lifestyle is already regrettable. It takes significantly more effort from a black man to fare better in life. This means that most black people are further pushed into remaining marginalized because of the history of redlining, regardless of it being illegal now. The news of atrocities in ghettos further hits media. This further strengthens stereotypes. And the cycle continues.
Fun fact: African-Americans make only 13% of the entire US population. However, 40% of the prisoners who were involved in unarmed shootouts are black.
After all these come people who cloak their racism in the guise of humor. Internet trolls and table-warmers are quick to snap at black people making Hip-Hop music claiming that that’s their place. They justify their claims saying that they’re not racist because their comments are not lethal and purely intended for comedic purposes. If we were to look deeper, petty jokes that associate Hip-Hop music and oversized basketball shirts to African-Americans have a snowball effect. Here’s how this works.
Media tells us that Hip-Hop and rap are the genres of African-Americans, because they talk about drugs and prostitution (two elements if considered evil, has no linkup with African-Americans in a non-biased community). For this reason, we attribute drugs and brothels to black communities. Furthermore, normalization of such cultures with African-Americans make us more likely to glorify news of a record label sale by a black man than one of the same person becoming a lawyer, or anything else. This creates an idea that singing about gun violence is all that black people are good at. This means that no matter how far these people come, their achievements will always get shot down by some internet troll, claiming that they’re not supposed to be here. Although we all understand that is untrue, the idea stays that African-Americans are not welcome into this world of highrollers. This means every time a black man starts achieving something, they feel unsafe about how the achievement is going to be perceived. Some other of them might even just choose not to try. This means that black people constantly feel unsafe because of our “harmless” jokes. And no matter how hard memers try to tell you otherwise, they are racist. They are partly responsible for the black community being marginalized. They misdirect public opinion and the marginalization of the black population further validates them.
Such harmless jokes feed into the mindsets of white supremacists that the black population is inferior. It further feeds their harmful biases. As a result, every time a black person tries to do something meaningful, the supremacists feel threatened. They feel the need to heavily reprimand the blacks getting influential. And we have already seen the effects of this. Black people have been murdered in voting booths, they have been obstructed from casting votes, they have been driven out of office without any justification.
Racism has existed throughout the ages. Just acknowledging that some people are racist isn’t enough. While we might agree that racism is bad, we must also realize that we subconsciously end up supporting racist notions. Racism can lead to direct (murder) or indirect (black people being too morally broken to try to be prosperous) impacts. It’s time we recognized our own problems and knelt on the right throats.