The Unspoken American Experience: 1,500,000 Missing Black Men

Many of us knew this intuitively, but the numbers are still shocking:

For every 100 black women not in jail, there are only 83 black men. The remaining men – 1.5 million of them – are, in a sense, missing.

Using data collected from the 2010 Census, Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, writing for The Upshot in the New York Times, attempt to account for those African-American males "'missing" from everyday life in the U.S.A: missing Dads, sons, grandfathers, brothers, coworkers, comrades, compadres, neighbors, and friends. They are "missing" in the sense that they are, for the most part, either dead from premature or unnatural causes-- such as homicide--or imprisoned.  They are not part of what we know as society. They are completely absent. They do not count, except as statistics.  Black males, for example, are six times more likely to be imprisoned than white males.  The biggest reason they are imprisoned is for drug-related offenses. Blacks make up 50% of the people incarcerated for drug crimes in state and local prisons, at a rate 10 times more than whites, even though five times as many whites use drugs as do African-Americans.

Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life...Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million.

If a comparable epidemic of "missing white men" (or white women) existed in this country it's beyond question that a transformative cultural reckoning would occur to discover and correct the cause. The media would be shouting from the rooftops, white families would be marching in the streets, our Republican Congress would be busily speechifying and passing laws instead of trying to deny the entire country an Attorney General based on her race, while simultaneously stoking more racism against immigrant Hispanics and Latinos as their "justification." But there is no such "gap" of "missing whites and no such cultural reckoning has taken place, There is no media outcry. To the contrary, racism is so pervasive and endemic to this country that its consequences have gradually become an accepted fact of what we euphemistically regard as the "American Experience."  Such "missing" African-American adult males are simply the way things are:  READ MORE