Ferguson's Fault Lines by Kimberly Jade Norwood

Author:Kimberly Jade Norwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2016-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Structural Inequality and Petty-Crimes Law Enforcement

To understand the real magnitude of the violence brought against African Americans by Ferguson-style justice and other injurious police and court practices, it is essential to examine the structural inequality and systemic and individual discrimination under which black lives are lived. Structural inequality denotes vestigial impediments to economic and educational equal opportunity that effectively create castes within the American social structure. Structural inequality and its racial correlative are predictive of the likelihood of one becoming engaged with the criminal justice system, for the poor are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, and African Americans are disproportionately represented among the poor.45 Once engaged with the criminal justice system, racial discrimination in the labor market interacts with the collateral consequences of their engagement to bind blacks more inescapably to the structural inequality that facilitated the engagement in the first place.

Although structural inequality cabins the potential for success of African Americans as a whole, its effects on black men have been especially devastating. For every 100 nonincarcerated black females between the ages of 25 and 54, there are only 83 nonincarcerated black males within the same age range.46 Adult black males disproportionately fall out of society primarily due to incarceration and early death, with the incarceration rates since 1980 accelerating to more than offset the decreasing rates of early death.47 No such gender gap exists among whites, where for every 100 nonincarcerated white females between the ages of 25 and 54, there are 99 similarly situated white men.48 Among blacks in Ferguson, Missouri, the gap is even more yawning: for every 100 black female cohorts, there are just 60 black men.49 Indeed, Ferguson boasts the largest gap of any jurisdiction with 10,000 or more blacks.50 All told, there are 1.5 million “missing” black men in the United States.51

Life for those black men who are not among the missing can be notably bereft, especially for young black men. A 2015 Gallup-Healthways well-being survey of more than 97,000 men found that black men under the age of 35 had the lowest well-being index score of any group, a difference that was statistically significant.52 Conditions in Ferguson are a microcosm of the reasons for this group’s bleak outlook. Forty-seven percent of black males ages 16 to 24 are unemployed in St. Louis County, Missouri, which encompasses Ferguson.53 By contrast, 16 percent of white men in this age cohort are unemployed.54 Across the nation, young black men as a group face heightened unemployment, diminished graduation rates, higher incarceration rates, and less access to healthcare—a despairing brew that cripples socioeconomic mobility, if not hope itself.55

The economic violence of everyday black life is, of course, a condition shared across genders, even if gender itself may in some circumstances exacerbate the condition. The unemployment rate for blacks nationally was 9.5 percent as of June 2015, compared to 4.6 percent for whites.56 By recent history, blacks in St. Louis County have tended to fare worse than blacks nationally, having had an unemployment rate that was 2.

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