What is wrong with being black pdf free download

To edit, use a different app, Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, which should include an editor - or contact the TechZone during core opening hours.

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC does not have an editor. Add a public comment to this FAQ. Related Topics. Electronic Resources E-books. Contact Us. Brunel Library. Privacy notice. Powered by Springshare ; All rights reserved. By measuring telomere length in hundreds of women, Geronimus estimated that black women were, biologically, about seven and a half years older than white women of the same age.

Unrelenting stress also affects our daily behaviors: Stress causes some people to eat more, especially calorically dense foods, and to sleep less. On average, African Americans get about 40 minutes less sleep each night than white people do. Among women in one recent study , poor sleep alone explained more than half the racial disparity in cardiovascular-disease risk. Living in a dangerous neighborhood like Sandtown requires a vigilance that can flood the body with adrenaline and cortisol.

These hormones are supposed to kick in only long enough for us to get away from an immediate threat. Even well-off black people face daily racial discrimination, which can have many of the same biological effects as unsafe streets.

In an emerging field of research, scientists have linked stress, including from prejudice, to compounds called methyl groups attaching to our genes, like snowflakes sticking to a tree branch. These methyl groups can cause genes to turn on or off, setting disease patterns in motion. Recently, a study linked racial discrimination to changes in methylation on genes that affect schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and asthma.

Several studies also show that experiencing racism might be part of the reason black women are about 50 percent more likely than white women to have premature babies and about twice as likely to have low-birth-weight babies. Researchers think the stress they experience might cause the body to go into labor too soon or to mount an immune attack against the fetus. Throughout the fall, Kiarra kept her doctor appointments, and she began working out at the small gym at Penn North, placing a picture of Chrissy Lampkin, the curvaceous girlfriend of the rapper Jim Jones, on her treadmill as motivation.

Like most Americans, she got advice from her friends on what to eat—but that advice at times proved confusing and contradictory. She tried a boiled-egg diet, which left her with hunger pangs and a lot of leftover eggs in the fridge. She went seven days without meat but wound up eating more starches, which sent her blood sugar soaring. Hicks began by asking Kiarra what her goal was. They walked to a room across the hall, and Kiarra stepped onto a scale. I eat too much. Hicks pulled up a web page describing fruits and vegetables that contain fiber.

She listed them off one by one. Her grandmother cooked healthy meals, putting turkey in big pots of greens for flavor. She had a rule that you could never leave the table without eating your vegetables.

Kiarra would fall asleep at the table. It is also one of the few luxuries around. Food deserts, by contrast, simply lack grocery stores. One study in New York found that as the number of African Americans who lived in a given area increased, so did the distance to the nearest clothing store, pharmacy, electronics store, office-supply store.

Meanwhile, one type of establishment drew nearer: fast-food restaurants. After the riots of the s, the federal government began promoting the growth of small businesses in minority neighborhoods as a way to ease racial tensions.

The urban expansion made business sense. Fast-food executives looked for ways to entice black customers. Burger King made ads featuring Shaft. Black children today see twice as many soda and candy ads as white children do. The marketing and franchising onslaught worked, and the diets of low-income people changed dramatically. Before the rise of fast food and processed foods, many low-income black families grew their own food and ate lots of grains and beans.

In , one study found, poor and middle-income blacks ate healthier—though often more meager—diets than rich whites did. But over the next few decades, the price of meat, junk food, and simple carbohydrates plummeted, while the price of vegetables rose. One reason college graduates live longer, researchers believe, is that education endows people with the sense that they control their own destiny.

Sometimes, she would dream of turning Beautiful Beyond Weight into a business—one that would sell T-shirts and caps with empowering messages for plus-size women. He would tell her to pray and meditate. In November, some combination of prayer, meditation, and research led Kiarra to enroll in a medical-assistant training program. Once she had her medical-assistant certificate in hand, she would move to Philadelphia, get a job at Temple University, and take classes to become a registered nurse.

Eventually, she hoped to become a nursing professor. That future held everything she wanted: helping people, being a leader, making her own money, having her own place. Feeling chipper, she decided to browse the wigs at a nearby store, stroking the hairpieces and whispering to the best ones that she would be back for them on payday. She tried to boss him around, but he told her to mind her own business, and she kind of liked that.

His birthday was approaching, and she wanted to take him someplace fancy. She would wear a black dress, and he would wear a black suit. To help pay for everything, Kiarra decided to register as a Lyft driver.

She was also reconsidering her plans for the future, now thinking that instead of setting her sights on Temple, she should focus on graduating and finding a job—any job—that would pay well enough and provide insurance that would cover her extensive health-care needs. Her grandmother said driving for Lyft in Baltimore was too dangerous. She might not move to Philly after all. But a new opportunity presented itself. Because of a change in her insurance plan, Kiarra had to switch doctors. Right away, her new doctor asked her whether she had considered bariatric surgery.

Kiarra said she was scared of the complications, such as digestive problems and infections, but the doctor reassured her that complications are rare. She was interested in the gastric sleeve, a procedure that would dramatically reduce the size of her stomach, causing hormonal changes that would help her lose much of her body fat.

Bias is introduced into the model via a lower cost to officers of searching Black suspects and, in turn, a lower equilibrium carrying rate for Black citizens. Dharmapala and Ross extended the model of Knowles, Persico, and Todd to allow for imperfect observability of citizens by the. Specifically, lower hit rates imply disparate treatment. However, equal or even higher hit rates for Blacks cannot rule out bias or animus see Dharmapala and Ross, , for an alternative development of this argument.

The innovation here is to admit the possibility that for most individuals, the police cannot increase the likelihood of detection to percent given resource constraints. With this extension, there will be some individuals for whom the relative benefits of carrying are high and for whom the pure strategy of always carrying dominates. To the extent that the fraction of the population for whom this pure strategy is optimal differs across racial groups, the infra-marginality problem reemerges and the strong predictions from Knowles, Persico, and Todd regarding the consequences of bias for relative hit rates disappears.

There is a large and persistent gap in the level of trust that non-White people have in law enforcement as compared to White people, a longstanding phenomenon that is a function of the history reviewed below. This difference is highlighted in a recent study from the Cato Institute Ekins, That study found that 68 percent of White respondents viewed the police favorably, while 40 percent of Black respondents reported favorable views. Similarly, 43 percent of Black respondents, but 62 percent of White respondents, say the police are courteous; 31 percent of Black respondents, but 64 percent of White respondents, believe that the police treat everyone equally; and about 4 in 10 Black respondents rate the police highly in terms of enforcing the law, protecting them from crime, and responding quickly to calls for help, as opposed to approximately 6 in 10 White respondents.

The Cato Institute study discussed above finds even larger gaps between White people and Hispanic people in the views held about the police Ekins, We note that the more frequently measured racial gap between White people and Black people in views about the police is generally unchanged over recent decades and that overall trust in the police as measured by national polls, such as the Gallup Poll, has remained more or less constant over the past 30 years, with between 50 and 60 percent of adult Americans expressing trust in the police Balz and Clement, ; Jones, A representative survey of police officers in the United States revealed similar differences in how White and Black police officers viewed treatment of non-White people Weisburd and Greenspan, That study found that officers were more likely to speak to Black drivers in informal familiar language e.

These differences extend to how officers feel about the need for police reform, particularly with respect to how the police interact with people in non-White communities. For example, a recent survey of police officers conducted by the Pew Research Center Morin et al. The response of people from different communities to a particular police incident or policing strategy is a function not only of the contemporary actions of the law enforcement but also of the historical relationship between those communities.

The historical record provides the framework for how those contemporary actions are viewed. In this section, we begin with a historical context for thinking about how changes in policing practices may be viewed in different communities, particularly non-White communities, in the United States. This section largely focuses on the relationship between Blacks and Black communities and the police. Blacks have been the largest non-White group for most of American history, whereas the Hispanic population in the United States was relatively small for most of the 20th century.

It was only in the mids that the Hispanic population began to grow at the pace typical of recent years. By , Blacks comprised Though there are some portions of the Hispanic community that have long histories with the police, such as Mexican Americans in the Southwest and Puerto Ricans in New York City, there is relatively less historical analysis of these policies.

Before we review key moments in the history of race and policing in the United States, three important points of clarification are necessary. First, the purpose of this short summary is not to document the specific history of each of the roughly 18, law enforcement agencies in the United States. Rather, we will describe policies, both federal and more local, that potentially influenced all local agencies because of their national character or.

Second, this is not a history of racial animus or bias in the formation and application of proactive policing strategies in particular about which relatively little is known. Rather, the discussion focuses on the role of racial bias in general, and animus in particular, in police practices in general and the resultant disparate impacts on members of specific racial and ethnic groups.

Current proactive policing policies have developed and have been implemented in an era in which the police are widely credited with having made considerable improvement in their behavior when dealing with Black Americans and with predominantly Black communities National Research Council, But the form, impact, and perception of these policies are certainly affected by this history.

Third, in this account the committee has sought to highlight how the structure of criminal justice policies, both in the past and today, can have the effect of both creating and perpetuating racial inequality in the absence of explicit racial animus or racially biased behavior. As discussed in Chapter 3 , this makes systematic bias in policing policies particularly difficult to identify and potentially address in both a legal and social science sense.

Police are charged with enforcing laws and ordinances in the communities they serve. For the majority of people living in the United States, the police are the visible face of the government and certainly of the criminal justice system. This means that police officers historically, in the course of their jobs, were tasked with enforcing rules that in some instances, as in the case of vagrancy laws, explicitly disadvantaged non-White people Goluboff, ; Douglas, There are plenty of examples from American history of policies that were explicitly the product of racial animus and deliberately disadvantaged Black people.

These policies often relied on local police for the force of law. Even after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, local governments continued to pass laws that specifically required police officers to arrest Black people or people who engaged in certain economic transactions with Black people. In cities throughout the country, Black people were prohibited from otherwise public spaces that were reserved for White people, including but not limited to swimming pools, lunch counters, restrooms, water fountains, and public schools.

People who entered these spaces in violation of local ordinances were arrested by the police Hinton, a , b ; Goluboff, ; Branch, Prior to , communities could freely adopt racially restrictive covenants that criminalized the leasing of property to non-White people or to members of certain religious groups Brooks and Rose, Because these sundown-town policies often were informal, it is difficult to determine when the practice ended—or whether it completely has.

In his archival and ethnographic research, Loewen found formal signs demarking sundown towns as late as the s, with officials in some jurisdictions still admitting to informal enforcement as recently as In addition to the criminal justice system being used for explicitly racist purposes, U.

These examples are particularly relevant, as modern proactive policies are often implemented in a manner that can be justified legally in race-neutral terms although important concerns about the extent to which proactive policies interact with enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment are discussed in Chapter 3. For the purpose of providing historical context, we highlight some particularly salient examples of policy changes that, despite having as a touchstone the seemingly objective goal of crime reduction, are now commonly understood both to have had serious negative implications for non-White people and to have enhanced, rather than mitigated, racial inequality in the United States Alexander, ; Garland, b ; Hinton, a , b ; Pager, ; Holzer, Raphael, and Stoll, ; Raphael and Stoll, A direct implication of this history is that, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, the historical record does.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U. While technically race neutral, these laws in practice were applied almost exclusively to Black people and were actively used to control and limit the newly freed population.

Georgia, for example, criminalized hunting on Sundays and letting cattle roam free, but only in counties with large Black populations Foner, A key feature of all of these laws was a vagrancy statute requiring individuals to prove, on demand and in writing, that they were employed.

Failure to do so would result in arrest and fine, incarceration, or both Ransom and Sutch, Once arrested and convicted Black Codes also tended to prohibit non-White people from serving on juries , Black people were no longer protected by the Thirteenth Amendment. This produced a perverse incentive for states to arrest individuals from vulnerable populations—overwhelmingly Black people—to serve as revenue engines for the state Larsen, ; Lichtenstein, This practice, although formally abolished by Alabama the last state in , persisted in less formal ways until it was finally outlawed in , a mere 75 years ago Blackmon, Specific actions of individual police officers, along with policies and practices ordered by mayors or governors, created a situation in which law enforcement was used to deny or limit the social, economic, and legal rights of Black people during the Civil Rights Movement.

Central components of modern U. Price U. This active resistance by law enforcement to the Civil Rights Movement coincided with federal government policies that expanded the physical presence of officers in places where many Black people lived, resulting in greater entanglement of Black people in the criminal justice systems of states and cities. Both bills created new federal grant programs that directed federal funds to local law enforcement agencies through the Justice Assistance Grant JAG Program.

As the federal government expanded the War on Drugs through the s, the disparity in implementation manifested itself in two notable ways.

First, Black people were arrested for drug use in proportions, as a percentage of group population, that were much higher than survey data on drug use would predict.

By the early s, Black adults made up only 13 percent of drug users according to survey data but constituted 40 percent of those arrested for drug violations Langan, Second, federal penalties for drug violations put in place by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of were substantially more severe for drugs that Black people were more likely to use. In , the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse found that 12 percent of White people over the age of 12 reported any lifetime use of cocaine, compared with 9.

With little debate, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed a 5-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of only 5 grams of crack cocaine, while it imposed the same mandatory minimum punishment for possession of grams of powder cocaine. Although the social settings of typical transactions for crack and powder cocaine are different and the faster absorption of processed crack cocaine leads to different consumption experiences Nestler, ; National Institute on Drug Abuse, , the weight ratio in thresholds for punishment for crack and powder put in place in is difficult to justify using objective measures of social harm Bobo and Johnson, ; Tonry and Melewski, Despite repeated recommendations by the U.

Sentencing Commission to revise the crack quantity thresholds upward, to lessen the disparity between the sentencing scheme for the two forms of the drug, and several legislative efforts to mitigate the difference, Congress did not act to reduce the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine until the Fair Sentencing Act of This law implemented mandatory life sentences for people convicted of serious federal crimes if they had previously been convicted of drug or violent offenses at the federal or state level.

In part supported by federal funding programs designed to increase local policing, police departments serving cities with more than , people have more police per capita around 22 per 1, people in than departments in other places about 16 per 1, people in U. Department of Justice, To the extent that the Black population of the United States is more likely to live in larger cities than the White population, 3 Black people are more likely to come in contact with the police, all other things being equal, simply because they live in places where there are more police officers.

Pointing out the instances in which criminal justice policies, and policing in particular, have differentially impacted Black people does not invalidate the observation that Black and other non-White communities have benefited from some policies that have brought greater focus on crime within their communities.

Policing, like clean water, good street lighting, and public transportation, is a public good designed in principle to help victims of crime and, more generally, support community members in achieving their goals and projects. During the same period that birthed these social policies and proactive policing, many Black communities expressed a desire for both harsher punishments of criminal behavior and more responsive policing Fortner, ; Kennedy, In fact, a parallel if less prominent critique of police and race in the United States is that Black neighborhoods have historically suffered from under-policing Kennedy, ; Forman, There is a growing body of evidence that exposure to violence and crime is an important component of persistent poverty Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa, ; McCoy et al.

Taken together, these findings imply although they do not prove that reductions in crime may reduce some forms of racial inequality. It is certainly the case that the spectacular declines in U. These declines greatly reduced the disparity in crime rates relative to suburban cities. Within cities, there is also evidence suggesting that these declines in crime accrued disproportionately to non-White neighborhoods Lofstrom and Raphael, Over the past 40 years, police departments across the country have become more diverse Sklansky, , a phenomenon that has been credibly shown to reduce one potential measure of bias in policing—the relative arrest rates of Black and White adults—without affecting official crime rates McCrary, Table presents tabulations from various sources on the racial composition of police and other law enforcement entities.

While there are some discrepancies between these different measures, the underlying trends are quite clear. In the s, law enforcement officers were largely White.

This finding is consistent with data from LEMAS according to which law enforcement agencies overall have become more diverse since and departments serving larger jurisdictions have become even more diverse Reaves, ; see also Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, , p.

However, a study analyzing police personnel data for police departments in jurisdictions with more than , residents also found that 1 there are still substantial gaps between the representation of non-Whites within law enforcement agencies and their demographic representation in communities, and 2 the representation of non-Whites in police departments has not kept pace with changing demographics Governing , ; see also Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, , p.

In summary, while there have been important changes in the scope for racial bias and animus in policing, with respect to the impact of proactive policing on racial bias and disparate outcomes, law enforcement in the United States does not start with a clean slate. As noted by Chief Terrence M. This perspective is echoed in the discussions that the committee had with representatives from Black Lives Matter see Appendix A.

The committee was urged repeatedly by community advocates to avoid a narrow. For instance, Brittany Packnett, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement and a national figure in the wake of the Ferguson, Missouri, protests, advised the committee to include the full context that shapes community experiences, from history to broader social constructions of race see Appendix A. She elaborated:. Well, why are we poor? Why is it all Black and Latino over here? It is impossible to divorce those realities when you live in this skin and when you live in our zip code.

That lack of context always feels biased. The committee views this perspective as important to keep in mind throughout the remaining sections of the chapter. Because the focus of our study task is on policing, we do not examine the broader social forces that lead to the outcomes that police address. As Ms. Packnett suggested to the committee, an alternative approach would be to employ social rather than policing interventions to address crime problems. Although such approaches have been suggested to address, for example, crime hot spots see Weisburd, Telep, and Lawton, , they have not been developed broadly as crime prevention approaches in recent years.

The choice of policing as a response to crime problems is in itself a policy decision that has implications for communities. The historical and contemporary social context of policing plays a role in how communities perceive police behavior, and one cannot assess the motivation for or effect of disparate treatment or racially biased behavior without recognizing that proactive policing is nested in the more general historical context of racial disparities and bias in policing.

This context must include attention to the experiences of Black and other non-White Americans, with due consideration to the impacts on Black and other non-White communities. The committee identified four components of many proactive policing strategies that are plausibly related to an increase in racially disparate criminal justice outcomes.

As discussed in later sections, only a limited body of research has empirically tested the causal connections between these potential mechanisms and changes in racial disparities and racial bias. First, if non-White people are more likely to commit criminal offences, racial disparities in police-citizen interactions are likely to occur. Earlier reviews of the empirical literature did indeed document relatively higher offending rates among Black people in the United States Sampson and Lauritsen, ; Tonry, , rates that were likely influenced by a range of factors known to increase crime, including differences in income, education, social networks, discrimination, neighborhood characteristics, and many others.

Hence, a proactive effort to combat robbery may generate a racial disparity in arrest rates to the extent that members of one group commit this offense at a higher rate than the comparison group. Disparities in the historical relationship between law enforcement and residents of difference races and ethnicities can manifest not only as differential crime rates across demographic groups but also as different behaviors on the part of citizens interacting with police.

Extensive research demonstrates that, compared to White people, Black people are more distrustful and nervous even scared when interacting with a police officer e. As a second example, U. Accordingly, officers are statistically more likely to encounter Black citizens in high-crime neighborhoods. An officer may decide to question a Black suspect partly because the encounter occurs in a high-crime area Terrill and Reisig, Second, police departments may prioritize enforcing ordinances and laws that non-Whites are more likely to violate.

For example, if Black and Latino drug users are more likely to purchase narcotics on street corners or. Disparities may also result from explicit or implicit priorities communicated by police leadership to officers on patrol. Certainly a proactive departmentwide policy of targeting, say, young Black men would be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, in a nation with nearly 18, independent law enforcement agencies, it is possible that such policies articulated from the top govern law enforcement practice in some jurisdictions.

Third, policing efforts may be geographically concentrated. This may result naturally from the geographic concentration of calls for services and calls to report a crime that initiate investigations. Alternatively, disparities may result from proactive strategies that target specific neighborhoods. To the extent that high-crime areas that disproportionately generate calls for service are more likely to become the focus of proactive strategies and more likely to be located in non-White neighborhoods, racial disparities in the incidence of police—citizen interactions will result.

More focused geographic programs, such as hot spots policing, may reduce overall police intrusion in larger neighborhoods by focusing on the small number of streets that have high-crime rates D. Weisburd, Nonetheless, non-White people may in turn be overrepresented on the targeted streets. Finally, proactive policies that target high-activity offenders or those with more extensive criminal histories are likely to involve non-White suspects disproportionately. As previously discussed, non-White, and particularly Black, Americans are more likely to live in areas with more police per capita.

This will likely result in more contact with the police, and thus an increased probability of being identified as a high-activity offender for Black people relative to otherwise identical White people. This section attempts to evaluate the contribution contemporary psychological science can make to understanding the role of racial bias in proactive policing. Studying racial animus and statistical prediction has been a central concern of American psychology since nearly the start of the 20th century.

During that era in American history, negative racial attitudes were more openly expressed than is typical today. Overt, non-anonymous expressions of racial animus have declined markedly in American society because social norms have evolved to prohibit them Dovidio, ; Dovidio and Gaertner, Similarly, evaluations of the police have suggested that there have been important gains in professionalism, leading to less racial animus among law enforcement officers National Research Council, Although overt expressions of biased behavior have declined in society and among police, racial animus has not disappeared.

Rather, it has evolved. While this research has had little direct translation to the field of policing, it does establish basic findings about factors and situations where people are more likely to express, and act upon, negative racial attitudes. These findings have potential implications for how the actions of individual police officers, and policing policies more generally, may be shaped by attitudes such as racial animus or prediction.

For example, in one influential study, participants sat at a computer and completed a series of trials on which a face appears briefly and is quickly followed by a word Fazio et al. What is Wrong With Being Black? Rate This Product. Delivery and Shipping. Show More. Instant download. Expected to ship tomorrow from Australia. Learn More. Read using our free app on your tablet or mobile! Free Shipping. You May Also Like.

Be a Hero. Wesley Campbell , Stephen Court. Add to Basket.