U.S. Institutional Racism: a Genocide of 1.5 Million Black Men, or the Maintenance of the Three-Fifths Compromise

No one will be tried at The Hague. The crimes against humanity, the disappearance of 1.5 million black men in the prime of life, 25 years of age to 54, have been going on for a long time in the United States. One would have to go back to the founding of the nation and the "Three-Fifths Compromise" at the 1787 Constitutional Conventional to appreciate the genocidal nature that lies at the core of the country.

That is why the work The New York Times has done exposing American institutional racism in wake of the Mike Brown shooting last summer is appreciated. The Gray Lady might be a willing accomplice in the ongoing destruction of the Middle East and the New Cold War because of slanted reporting that bolsters the false narrative peddled by USG, but in the homeland she advocates relatively progressive positions.

This morning's "1.5 Million Missing Black Men" by Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy puts a statistical face on institutional racism:

In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.

They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.

African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.

Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.

“The numbers are staggering,” said Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas.

And what is the city with at least 10,000 black residents that has the single largest proportion of missing black men? Ferguson, Mo., where a fatal police shooting last year led to nationwide protests and a Justice Department investigation that found widespread discrimination against black residents. Ferguson has 60 men for every 100 black women in the age group, Stephen Bronars, an economist, has noted.

Ferguson is literally trying to be true to the "Three-Fifths Compromise":

Since the 1990s, death rates for young black men have dropped more than rates for other groups, notes Robert N. Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both homicides and H.I.V.-related deaths, which disproportionately afflict black men, have dropped. Yet the prison population has soared since 1980. In many communities, rising numbers of black men spared an early death have been offset by rising numbers behind bars. 

It does appear as if the number of missing black men is on the cusp of declining, albeit slowly. Death rates are continuing to fall, while the number of people in prisons — although still vastly higher than in other countries — has also fallen slightly over the last five years.

But the missing-men phenomenon will not disappear anytime soon. There are more missing African-American men nationwide than there are African-American men residing in all of New York City — or more than in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Washington and Boston, combined.