A SocImages Collection: Police, Black Americans, and US Society
Compiled by Lisa Wade, PhD
Why are relations between black America and the police so fraught? I hope that this collection of 50 posts on this topic and the experience of being black in this country will help grow understanding. See, also, the Ferguson syllabus put together by Sociologists for Justice, the Baltimore syllabus, and this summary of the facts by Nicki Lisa Cole.
Race and policing:
- Race and gun laws in practice
- When force is hardest to justify, victims of homicide by police are most likely to be black
- The failure of racial profiling
- Stand Your Ground increases racial bias in “justifiable homicide” trials
- In simulations, people are quicker to shoot at people perceived as black
- The war on blacks: Arrests for marijuana possession
- NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy
Perceptions of black men and boys as inherently criminal:
- Framing children’s deviance
- Race, clothes, and perceptions of criminality
- Who’s afraid of young, black men?
- Whose deviance do we notice?
- Media portrayals of Mark Duggan and Mike Brown
- Racial bias and media coverage of violent crime
Proof that Americans have less empathy for black people:
- The racial empathy gap
- The death penalty, race, and the victim
- Can black men be sexually assaulted?
- Racial disparity in imprisonment inspire whites to be tough on crime
- Failure to understand when non-white people distrust the police
Evidence of the consistent maltreatment, misrepresentation, and oppression of black people in every part of American society:
- Racial wealth gaps that harm black children
- Fetishization and mocking of black women’s bodies
- The portrayal of black women as ugly
- Racism kills: New data on stress and mortality
- Racial differences in childhood asthma
- An elite university degree does not protect against racism
- Race and pre-term births
- Race and the initiation of treatment for breast cancer
- Racial bias in presidential pardons
- Racial bias in law firms
- Nearly half of black scientists mistaken for janitors or assistants
- Racism in ballet
- Racist antics at college parties, a collection
- Race, criminal records, and employment
- Percent of children with a parent in prison, by race
- Racial minorities have to wait longer at the polls
- Cultural invisibility: What color is “flesh”?
- Race, education, and earning potential
- College graduation and unemployment among blacks vs. whites
- Special education eligibility by race and region
- Black churches still going up in flames
- Whites, blacks, and kidney failure
- Racial bias in jury selection
- Whiteness as the standard of beauty
- White vigilantes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
- Distrust for black entrepreneurs
- Racialized representations of evolution
- Black invisibility in Hollywood
- Black/white disparities in prison sentences
- The children of the prison boom
- The sudden convergence of addiction treatment and whiteness
- And murder
On violent resistance:
- Angela Davis: “No idea what black people have gone through.”
- Stokely Carmichael: “The U.S. taught us very well how to be violent.”
- Malcolm X: “We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”
The situation now:
- “How much do you think people can take?”
- Zimmerman’s acquittal hurt race relations
- Race and beliefs about the ongoing fight for civil rights
- Many Americans overestimate and fear racial diversity
- 150 years of racism: Attitudes in the American South
- The average white American’s social network is 1% black
W.E.B. DuBois (1934):
The colored people of America are coming to face the fact quite calmly that most white Americans do not like them, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood. This does not mean all Americans. A saving few are worried about the Negro problem; a still larger group are not ill-disposed, but they fear prevailing public opinion. The great mass of Americans are, however, merely representatives of average humanity. They muddle along with their own affairs and scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers or people whom they partly fear and partly despise.
For many years it was the theory of most Negro leaders that this attitude was the insensibility of ignorance and inexperience, that white America did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro. Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.