Black defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than Black-a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared “inevitable.” 2 McCleskey v. In 2003, the Bureau of Justice Statistics projected that one of every three Black boys and one of six Latino boys born in 2001 will go to jail or prison under current trends. Ann Carson, Ph.D., “ Prisoners in 2017,” Bureau of Justice Statistics (April 2019). Native Americans are incarcerated at more than twice the rate of white Americans. States passed laws to segregate Black people, banning them from sharing public accommodations, barring them from interracial relationships, and humiliating them by restricting them to marginalized spaces.īlack men are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men Latino men are nearly three times as likely.
Southern lawmakers passed “Black Codes” so that African Americans could be arrested for “crimes” like loitering and forced to work in white-owned businesses and plantations throughout the South. This was reinforced during the decades of racial terror lynchings that followed enslavement when white people defended the torture and spectacle murder of Black people as necessary to protect their property, families, and way of life from Black “criminals.”Ĭriminalizing Black people was the basis for convict leasing, a system created to provide cheap labor after slavery was abolished. That racist belief survived the formal abolition of slavery and evolved to include the belief that Black people are dangerous criminals. Enslavement could not be sustained as legitimate without a false narrative about Black people being less human or worthy of freedom that would make it justifiable. The myth of racial hierarchy-the belief that Black people are inferior-was created to justify the enslavement of Black people.