America's Racial Disappearing 'Act'

America’s Racial Disappearing ‘Act’

“1.5 Million Missing Black Men”  by Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy (The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?_r=0

“Deadly Symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh” by Loic Wacquant (Punishment & Society)

Presently, increased attention on police brutality and the state-facilitated murder of African American men has brought the United States’ abysmal race relations to the forefront of media and politics. But somehow, the “1.5 million black men missing from everyday life,” as reported by the New York Times this year, is not eliciting sufficient concern from state officials tasked with the safety of American lives. By examining “Deadly Symbiosis” by Loic Wacquant, we see where these African American men have gone. Wacquant traces U.S. history to show how four ‘peculiar institutions’ have been “defining, confining and controlling” African Americans in what is essentially a process of racial engineering by the state (Wacquant, 98).

Wacquant’s theory is that there have been four institutions in American History that have functioned as ‘race-making’ devices which “[draw] and enforce the peculiar ‘color line’” (Wacquant, 98). These institutions are as follows: slavery, the Jim Crow South, the ghetto and finally, the 'hyperghetto' or prison. Wacuant argues that each institution was used as a new way to extract labor and socially ostracize stigmatized African Americans. After slavery was abolished there was a shortage in cheap labor, so the ruling southern class created Jim Crow laws, establishing “forced labor and police laws to get the freedmen back to the fields and under control” (Wacquant, 100). The aggressiveness of these laws forced a migration of African Americans to urban areas in the North for industrial work. White fear of miscegenation led to the creation of the ghetto, which along with restrictive covenants, kept African Americans secluded and segregated from society. Wacquant states that “the prison functions as a ‘judicial ghetto’ relegating individuals disgraced by criminal conviction to a secluded space harboring the parallel social relations and cultural norms that make up ‘a society of captives’” (Wacquant, 103).

Now, how does the disappearance of African American men effect African American women? 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” (New York Times). This was so significant to the division of class because it lead to the reality that in 1980, “three out of every four [African American] households were headed by women” (Wacquant). Single-mother households are statistically less financially stable than households with two parental incomes. I argue that this contributed to the depacification of black communities and the subsequent masculinization of young black men when interacting with each other. Finally, the degeneration of ghettos into “hyperghettos” was marked by a distinct ‘prisonization’ of public and low income housing. African American bodies were already secluded, segregated and then layered with additional state controls such as “police infiltration, random searches, …curfews, and resident counts” (Wacquant, 107).  

It is time for the American public to start examining the institutions that are causing an overwhelming number of African American men to ‘disappear’ from society.  This gap, “driven mostly by incarceration and early deaths, does not exist among whites” (New York Times). This signifies a serious race problem, not just with American society, but more importantly with the judicial & legislative enforcement of the State itself. The disappearance of 1.5 million African American men in the U.S. is not an accident or a magic ‘act.’ Let us call this ‘disappearance’ for what it is: racial engineering by our beloved United States of White Supremacy.