The Good Luck Of Being Black in America
Geraldine Ferraro has made a thought-provoking and surgical comment about why Barack Obama is doing so well with the electorate and the American people in his campaign to be chosen as the Democratic nominee for President.
Essentially she said that he was “lucky” that he was a black man. That all of his successes have come easier to him because of the dark pigment of his skin.
I thought I would examine her theory.
Is Barack lucky to be black? Is that why he is beating Hillary Clinton?
Well, first I wanted to look at the general “luckiness” of being a black man in America. The facts are really staggering. Below you will find some lucky statistics.
A) More Whites Use Drugs, But More Blacks Are Imprisoned
The report said that African Americans accounted for 62 percent of the drug offenders sent to state prisons nationwide in 1996, the most recent year for which statistics are available, although they represent just 12 percent of the U.S. population. Overall, black men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men, according to the study, which analyzes a wide range of Justice Department information for 37 states to come up with its findings.
These disparities exist even though data gathered by the Department of Health and Human Services show that in 1991, 1992 and 1993, about five times as many whites had used cocaine than blacks, the report said.
B) Blacks Are Incarcerated at 4 times the rate of Blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era
Black men in America are more than 8 times more likely to be incarcerated than White men.
The disproportionate representation of black Americans in the U.S. criminal justice system is well documented. Blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested, 41 percent of people in jail, and 49 percent of those in prison. Nine percent of all black adults are under some form of correctional supervision (in jail or prison, on probation or parole), compared to two percent of white adults. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995. One in ten black men in their twenties and early thirties is in prison or jail. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws.
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C) Today only [one-third] of black children have two parents in the home.
The sad truth is that Black children are only half as likely as white children to be living in a two-parent household, and are eight times more likely than white children to live with an unwed mother. For black children under six, ” the most common arrangement– applying to 42 percent of them — was to live with a never-married mother.”
During the days of slavery a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents than he or she is today.
