Now that we are well into February, which is Black History Month, it is the time to celebrate the end of legal segregation and acknowledge the various accomplishments of black men and women to society. Of course, this nation has made great strides in terms of racial equality since the times of slavery and Jim Crow. However, we still have a ways to go before we achieve true racial equality.
In his book Between the World and Me, written in 2015, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates explains what he feels living in the United States as a black man is like: a black man does not own his body. It can be taken from him in an instant. No matter what a black man is doing, his life is constantly threatened by the police; the Washington Post reported that 34 percent of unarmed people killed by police officers were black men. To put this statistic in perspective, black men make up only six percent of the population.
Such racism manifests itself violently at times even when the black victim fully cooperates with the authorities. Philando Castile was murdered in Minnesota with his girlfriend and young daughter in the car with him after he informed the officer that he was legally carrying a firearm.
Police brutality is one of the most overt examples of the contemporary black struggle in the United States, but one of the more subtle systems of oppression is the criminal justice system. The War on Drugs, popularized in the 1970’s and 1980’s and masked with colorblind rhetoric, has targeted primarily black people and demoted them to a lower social status, branding them as felons and legalizing discrimination against them in housing, welfare, and other government amenities.
The war was declared against drugs – dubbed as “public enemy number one” by Richard Nixon – inherently targeted people of color through rhetoric that carried racial connotations. Though white and black people participate in illicit drug activities at extremely similar rates, black people are disproportionately arrested in comparison; Michelle Alexander cites in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that the number of black people in prison in 2000 was more than 26 times the number of black people in prison in 1983 despite no significant increase in drug-related crime rates.
These barriers are not comparable to the slavery and lynchings of years past, but they still pose formidable obstacles to African-Americans. Yes, February is a time to rejoice on what we have accomplished thus far, but it must also be a time to realize what still must be done and come together as a nation to achieve true racial equality.
