Miracle of the Incarnation

Excerpt from Ella’s Song

Composed by Bernice Johnson Reagon, copyright: Songtalk Publishing Co.

Refrain:We who believe in freedom cannot restWe who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Verse 1Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sonsIs as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons
We who believe in freedom cannot restWe who believe in freedom cannot restuntil it comes

John 1:29
The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

“Behold the Lamb of God.” The Jews who had gathered around John the Baptist understood exactly what he was talking about. The proclamation of faith must be incarnational, because the Word became flesh and dwelt among us—we beheld his glory, so the Lamb of God signals that a spiritual transformation is upon us. This is more than a mere offering of sacrificial lambs, and goats and bulls.

The Word comes to each group, each nation, and each race in a special way. The entire third chapter of Joel, Isaiah 66:16, and Psalm 110:6 inform us that God will judge ethnicities/racial groups, the Greek translation of “ethnos” or races.

Why will God judge us as nations, as races? Because the Word, the Christ of God has come to us in our own skin, in our own experience, in our own tragedies, in our own stories, in our own music, in our own understanding of the cosmos. That’s how we can identify it, because as Dr. James Cone wrote in Black Theology and Black Power, it is a Word that takes on the drama of our situation, the reality of our suffering, our struggle, and our journey as a people.

When John said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” they understood this language and that is was a pivotal proclamation of a new reality. Leviticus 5:1 defined sin as guilt—“the guilt of those who do not speak up when they hear a public charge to testify against something they have seen or learned about, they will be held responsible.”

The sacrificial lamb and the sacrificial scapegoat were used by ancient Israel to deal with (1) guilt for silence in the face of evil and (2) guilt for participation in the very act of evil. In Leviticus 16:15 -17 the goat or lamb was slaughtered and its blood sprinkled on the altar to atone for sin.

In verses 21 and 22 a second animal or scapegoat was placed before the priest, he put his hands on its head and confessed the sins of the nation, and then someone was chosen to guide the goat away from the city, the community, to take it to a remote part of the wilderness where it could not possibly find its way back and leave it there.

The first sacrifice is removing the guilt of sin from the community. The second sacrifice involves bearing it, the sin away so that it is removed from memory and can never be practiced again. Jesus accomplished both as the Lamb of God and we can accomplish both as incarnations of the Christ of God, if we will complete the sacred work of bringing our nation to repentance.

This is a grave, serious matter and any proclamation of the Gospel that ignores it is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer categorized as “cheap grace”—which seems to be flowing like polluted water down a stream in American churches. Behold the Lamb of God. The collective burden of a nation, a race, an ethnicity must come to terms with the all-embracing efficacy of God through Jesus Christ. But how do different races find this efficacy? How do they get the burdens of their specific guilt, the heavy weight of their specific sins as a people, alleviated on the shoulders of the Lamb of God?

Marissa Alexander, abused by her husband, fired a warning shot at the wall to defend herself in her own home. She didn’t hit or harm anyone, yet the same district attorney who prosecuted George Zimmerman, told her that she should have run out of her home, not “stand her ground.” The white jury in Sanford, Florida sentenced her to 20 years in prison—a sentence she is now serving. Drunken neo-Nazis who, high on meth shouted racist-transphobic slurs at her, and slashed her in the face with a bottle, which required 11 stitches, chased Cece McDonald down the road. She defended herself with scissors as a last resort. She was sentenced to 41 months in prison.

The man who killed Trayvon stalked this unarmed child who was walking home to his family, even after being directly told not to by a 911 dispatcher. He murdered Trayvon. Was not charged of the killing for weeks, received donations from white Christians to cover his legal fees, and used the same “stand your ground” defense that Black Marissa and Black Cece had used. Free to kill again. In a real show of white racist pride and cynicism his gun was returned to him in the courtroom with a smile.

The Bible is indeed God’s revealed Word, and in order for repentance, the collective and individual turning towards Christ that the incarnation and its proclamation requires, these sins must be spoken and confessed and repented of by the people of the context who are committing them. That’s what Jesus required, because he also preached repentance before faith.

Without repentance—without metanoia, the turning away from silence, from the collusion of knowing that evil has been done and allowing it to continue without protest, without outrage, without “Hell no--we will not let this go”-- if we do not pick up Ella Baker’s song, “we who believe in freedom will not rest until it comes,” then the sin of the white race against the people of Africa, known as Black Americans remains.

All of us, must free America from the sin of its misguided, moronic, demonic obsession with the ideology of white supremacy. It is an ideology born out of the negation, the godless philosophy that emanates from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the oppressor, the knowledge that puffs up and stand in opposition to God’s claim over the children of God.

This is the counterfeit knowledge that passes itself off as enlightenment in opposition to the spiritual reality of the Christ in us, which alone can free us to live in the spirit, the image of God, the form in which all life was created. These spiritual powers of darkness have encouraged those who oppress and suppress and seek to dominate others to use this reified knowledge to dispossess all creation of its beauty, its radiance, its glory and its wonder.

The great reformer Martin Luther wrote, “If you deal with all the intricacies and nuances of the Gospel of grace, of repentance towards Christ, and of a life of gratitude in anticipation of the world to come, and yet fail to deal with the evils of your time, then”—said Luther—“you are not preaching the Gospel at all.”

Both writer and prophet James Baldwin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that Black American African were the one group who truly believed in an Almighty Sovereign God (Cecil Cone), that could lead the scapegoat, which carries the sin of white supremacy and all its manifestations, out of the community, out of the nation called America so that we would once and for all be free of it.

Dr. King, revising a theme first set forth by Phyllis Wheatley, even went so far as to consider this our destiny, the very reason why God allowed some of us to come from Africa, to save this nation, this people misguided by one of the Tree of Knowledge’s ideologies, which like every fruit on that tree is deluded by a focus on material rather than spiritual reality, in this case the incidence of skin color.

Will we lead the sin goat, the scapegoat out of the camp so that our nation might yet be saved? Isaac Watts wrote, “Yes I must fight if I should reign, increase my courage Lord.”

Trayvon Martin is now before us as a typological Lamb of God, calling us once again to stand up and take responsibility for guiding America to repentance. His death, his sacrifice reminds us that repentance has not happened in America, and the salvation of this nation, and the majority who continue to live by the creed of racist “just-us” instead of biblical justice, who perpetuate attacks against our children, who fight against our right to vote, to work to have a decent livelihood, all that wickedness cries out as a stench before God.

Our enemies and their many terror cells are already at our gates, in our cities. Not all the military might in the world has protected us from the same. Corporate espionage and unscrupulous international interests threaten the economic survival of our nation as a world power. If we do not stand against this evil, if we do not make this horrendous crime a turning point in our passive acceptance of the annihilation of our own kind, then there is no hope for America, and the judgment God decreed in Amos 8:1-12 against Israel will become a reality for us.

Jeannine Amber of Essence Magazine wrote in a recent Time Magazine editorial—

"Certain events have a way of changing everything, reorganizing life into an unforgettable before and after. For Black parents, the new demarcation between before and after was the moment we watched George Zimmerman walk free after being tried in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17 year old. Before the jury announced its not guilty verdict, black parents understood what we were up against as we sought to protect our sons.

'We knew our boys, adored and full of promise, might be treated like criminals by police even though they had committed no crimes. We were painfully reminded of this danger by the deaths of other people’s sons, like Sean Bell, who was shot and killed on the morning of his wedding in 2006 by New York Police who incorrectly thought their was a gun in his car, or Oscar Grant, III, who was fatally shot in 2009 by a transit cop in Oakland, California, while restrained and facedown; or unarmed college student Kendrec McDade, who was killed in 2012 when San Francisco police saw him clutching his waistband and assumed he had a firearm. . . . .

"We may never know exactly what happened that night Zimmerman shot Trayvon, but black parents know this: A neighborhood-watch man saw a brown-skinned teenager—a boy who could have been one of ours—wearing hoodie pulled up against the rain and assumed he was up to no good. That suspicion set into motion a chain of events that left the boy dead. How do we protect against that?

'Do we tell our children to run if they are being followed? Or should they stop and turn around? Do we tell them to defend themselves, as Trayvon appears to have done or to get on the ground like Oscar Grant? Both tactics ended in their deaths at the hands of grown white male supremacists.

'Studies have shown that police are likely to shoot at an African American suspect faster than at a white one. What about the untrained civilian? Armed with bias and a handgun, how likely is he to see a threat where none exists? Before Trayvon, we had the Talk to guard our children against danger. After Zimmerman’s acquittal in his death, we realize with anguish there may be little we can do to protect them.'

So are we really ready to proclaim, Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world? Are we ready to protest and write and march and picket and boycott and raise hell until our children are safe, until the scapegoat of white supremacy is once and for all carried into the wilderness of time until it becomes but a faint memory? Do we have the courage to assert our blessedness, to call for repentance concerning Black life in America?

Dr. Michelle Alexander in a recent viewpoint feature in Time Magazine wrote, “Trayvon Martin will not be the last black boy who dies or goes to jail or gives up on his life because he was viewed and treated a nothing but a problem. We are all guilty of being too quiet for too long. Let it be said hereafter that we were quiet no more.'

Have you reached a turning point? If the death of Oscar Grant, III was not your turning point here in Northern California, you now have another opportunity to get on board and proclaim to the world, “Behold the Lamb.

You as an incarnation of the Christ can carry this heinous sinful demonic ideology away, by your standing strong, because God in Christ is able to make you strong. Or will you go on chewing on the fruit of white oppression? Will we who believe in freedom, not rest until it comes?

Behold the Lamb of God! Who will watch, fight, pray, fight, watch and pray until Satan is cast out of our nation? Who will drag the sin-laden goat of white supremacy out of our our community, our country, our world? Are there any soldiers of the cross left in our midst, or are we content to play church while we are entertained by and with some fake "mamby-pamby Jesus" of the sewing circle (this last quote taken from sermon by The Rev. Peter Marshall)?

Protect Our People

 "Moses said to the YHWH, "May the LORD, the God of the spirits of all mankind appoint a man over this community.... (Numbers 27:15).

The future of young Black Boys is heavy on my heart as we struggle with the murder of Trayvon Martin. But the truth is I have grandchildren who are bi-racial, several not "Black at all, and I worry equally about them in a world where any child can be gunned down for being in "the wrong neighborhood" or on the "wrong street" or on the "wrong gang turf."

When our children and grandchildren are victimized because they are Asian, Black, Bi-Racial, Female, Gay, Latino, Lesbian, Male, poor or rich Americans, our natural collective, class-ist, ethnocentric, group sensibilities often become prominent in our thinking. We believe that it is a priority to "protect our people" from attacks because they are Jews or they are Blacks or they are transgender. We strategize how we can "protect OUR people."

In the midst of all the heat around the barbaric, senseless and lynch-like killing of Trayvon Martin, I would like to have the historic and prophetic folk wisdom of Moses and Jesus challenge our thinking (and my own).

God had already informed Moses that he would not lead the new generation into the promised land, so Moses responded, "Jehovah-God of ALL SPIRITS, appoint one over this community." Only God could appoint one who would be "over the community." This was a diverse community. The ancient Hebrews were in fact a people that represented diverse tribal groups (see "Tribes of Yahweh" by Norman Gottwald). Not only were they twelve diverse tribes (actually eleven with two half tribes), they had intermarried with a number of other tribal groups and nations, and in fact included in their midst from Egypt was a "mixed multitude," that is to say a multi-racial constituency (I therefore always smile when some Jews tell me they are "white people)." Really is racism so strong in America that every group that immigrates here wants to think of itself as "white?"

But more importantly, as the One Universal Spiritual Reality, God was the God of all spirits. The phrase translates from Hebrew loosely as "Source of Universal Spiritual Life." So much for all our superficial ethnic/racial distinctions (Race is also a very unscientific category). As with the apostasy of Miriam and Aaron concerning his Cushite wife, Moses understood that God is Spirit, and God embraces and is the universal one Loving One of all Spirits (Hence the Hebrew Shema-"Hear, O Israel, the One Lord our God"). In another place God declares, "All Souls are My Soul" (erroneously translated by some from the Greek "All souls are mine."

So God's soul/our souls are troubled by the murder of Trayvon because that boy's life is "Our Life." The scholars who mistranslated the koine (common Greek above) presupposed that God was concerned with or cognizant about ethnicity, gender, gender orientation, family, caste and class, hence they could not conceive in their translation efforts the idea of "One" rather than "many souls."

What really troubles us also is that all of us feel and recognize the same sickness alive in us that we perceived to exist in Mr. ZImmermen's heart. We are agitated about this, in part, because we know that the same fear, the same easy, ultimate, quick solutions to challenges to our existence can be erratic, irrational and genocidal. We would rather eliminate what threatens and challenges us and our world rather than negotiate and understand it. Zimmerman's solution to his fears comes too close to the raw, hidden recklessness concerning human life that is all too resident in us as well. We must, with Moses, become convinced that any solution that kills or negates the humanity of another does damage to our One Universal Spirit. Hence Moses continually "pleaded with God" not to destroy those who had "sinned" and "angered God" in some way. It was the Spirit-Force in his life elevating his consciousness above the tribalistic, ethnocentric, legalistic understanding that he and his community had always understood to be "of God."

In Luke 3:23 the author tells us that "Jesus was 33 years old when he began his ministry, and that he was the son, or so it was thought, of Joseph." Throughout Luke's Gospel he seeks to correct the thinking of the community that Jesus should be thought of as the Christ of God because he was the heir to some bloodline "from Joseph to Seth." No. It is not human blood that determines our oneness. It is not the tribe or clan or caste that determines our worth, our humanity, our "somebodyness." It is the fact that we are all part of the One Spiritual Life that we call God. The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 3 that even those who do not claim the name or the faith still, as their own Stoic philosophers have written, "live and move and have their being in that One Life."

I teach and proclaim the Virgin Birth of Christ, not as a dogma, but as a way of understanding that the life that we call "Christ" was a spiritual, not a human reality. Mary was not put away because what she had in her was of God, not because of her desire to fulfill her natural inclination to mate with Joseph. All children are our spiritual sons and daughters. All of them are heirs to God's life through the unconditional offer of Love. The crack babies, those born with birth defects, alcohol fetal syndome, Downs Syndrome, with "loser parents" all come into the world as God's re-incarnation of life. We are all daughters and sons of God. Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote, "We are sons and daughters of One Life."

Moses was affirming in his prayer, his request to God, "I know you are not looking for someone who in our opinion comes from the right gene pool. You do not evaluated based on outward appearances, on style without substance, on 'bling bling' and 'chi-ching.' You are not looking at mental acuity and physical strength, or for the well-born and the prominent name. The criteria you will use to choose a leader for the community is deep and has to do with mystical spiritual realities that are nascent in all life and yet for the most part elude us as human beings."

David offers a song of praise, "My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from him (Psalm 62:1)." Human blood, national origin, citizenship status, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, marriage, family, Jesus said none of this exists in heaven, but in that alternate plane, we are "as the angels (spiritual messengers)." In fact he said we already have "a house" in that plane that does not correspond with our natural reality. In other words most of "our souls" or "our real selves" already exists on that plane. What we have here in flesh and blood is representational of the individual entities (personifications) of the One Soul.

So in spite of the historical, sociological realities that inform this most heinous murder, let us not be sidetracked. Our real need is to embrace as people of faith and as a nation, the concept of the "Oneness of all Life--of all Sentient Beings." If any One Life is abused, castigated, crossed-out, diseased, killed, ignored, mis-educated, neglected, starved, then all of our lives are WORTH NOTHING! What then is happening to our world and to us, where so many continue to be nameless, invisible victims of our affluence and greed?

I have recently been reading "Parable of the Talents" by the late Octavia E, Butler. Her protagonist in that story, Olamina, would put it this way, "We shape God according to the Spiritual Light we allow to shine on our own souls." It is time open our souls more fully to God's light, that God's form in our hearts and minds might be re-shaped to a broader, more inclusive, more magnanimous representation of all humanity.

If it is a Boy, Kill Him - The Black Male in Ameria

Do they not go astray who devise evil?   Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people (Proverbs 14:22, 31, 32, 34)

Urban League report focuses on the Black male

     Black genocide: From the cradle to the grave (FCN, 12-22-2003)

     One on one with Dr. Frances Cress Welsing

'Empowering Black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today. Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African American community, but for the prosperity, health, and well-being of the entire American family.'

NUL President Marc H. Morial

“The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives . . . . ‘When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live (Exodus 1:15-15.)’”  This was Pharaoh’s edict to the Hebrew midwives.  We must pay careful attention to this passage.  Verses 9 and 10 tell us that the problem was that Pharaoh saw that “there were too many of them (Hebrews) and that they were “numerous and becoming more powerful.”  He cautioned his advisors, “Let us deal shrewdly with them (1:10).”

He thought he had the perfect plan.  The goal was not simply to eliminate the boys.  THE GOAL WAS TO WEAKEN THE PEOPLE.  It was to make them weak.  It was to decrease their numbers.  Seeing those who were supposed to bring and nurture life, act instead to destroy it is a real psychological blow to any community.  The first strategy was to get them to do the killing for him.  It may at first have seemed very arrogant and foolish of him to expect Hebrew midwives to kill Hebrew boys, but Pharaoh understood something about human nature. 

First, those who were to nurture life were being forced to serve as immediate witnesses to the genocide.  How many drugged-out mothers have succumbed to the pain of seeing the genocide and victimization of a white supremacist society over the hopes, dreams, futures and very physical safety of their offspring?

In the nations of the Third Reich, when poor Jews started disappearing, those with means could still buy a little food, a little freedom, and a little delay.  The Jews who became guards in the ghettos, and those who supported them, actually came to believe that the massive program of “relocation” (extermination) did not include them.   

Desperate people will easily resort to desperate denials and fantasies in the face of seeming overwhelming power and influence.  Oppressed people, especially those whose faith perspective is limited by their conception of material comfort, too often become the “Indian Scouts” for the colonial cavalry that will eventually annihilate them.  Then those who have had some meager benefit or “funding” from the rich and powerful are often all too ready to preserve their “privileged status” by doing “whatever it takes” to satisfy their benefactors.

The Black African American middle class community understands that many of even the most “progressive and enlightened” among whites in America (and their immigrant American clones and wannabees) have no use for them.  These people love to “help poor blacks,” to conduct mission trips to poor black communities and poor black nations.  They love to wring their hands about what they call “black-on-black” violence.  They sit in Universities and whip out statistics and write papers on all the remedial things they need to devise (of course with themselves in leadership) to save the next generation of “African Americans.”

Yet they won’t step foot in a church, join a club, a lounge, or a nightclub, shop at a grocery store, live in a neighborhood or a send their children to a school where black middle class are in the majority.  Many do not know famous black authors, inventors or significant historical contributions made by blacks.  Many, in spite of numerous advanced degrees have never read a Black author of any kind.  They do not like living and working in situations where Blacks are their “equal,” but prefer to take on the roll of beneficent paternalistic saviors to poor blacks.  They also work hard to pit poor Blacks against middle class Blacks.  They seek to create a false consciousness among poor and middle class Blacks about each other.  Through construct, myth and theory they seek to help all understand how the Black middle class are distant and look down on them, all the while ignoring the fact that these so-called “Poor Blacks” are the brothers, sisters, cousins—and often children of Black middle class families.  Hence we saw television programs in the 70s like the “White Shadow” and “Webster,” and the media still spends an inordinate amount of space and time focusing on that one white teacher or principal who needs to be commended for just doing the job they were paid to do in a “predominantly Black/Latino” school or community center.

Nevertheless, the attempt to destroy the Black middle class and its growth by destabilizing black communities, black households, black economy and black families is working.  The criminal “just-us” system in America has been most effective in carrying out genocide against Black (middle class and poor and underclass) America.  Below are a few illustrations and statistics worth repeating:

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - The prospects are bleak. Genocide is no exaggeration.  Incarceration, AIDS, unemployment and the school drop-out rate are all problems challenging Black people in America—Black males in particular—and according to this year’s annual report released Apr. 17 by the National Urban League (NUL) entitled “The State of Black America: Portrait of the Black Male,” these problems represent the most serious social crisis occurring in the United States today.

“A quarter of all Black Americans live below the federal poverty level, a poverty rate about twice the national rate,” Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) writes in the report’s foreword. “In some cities, more than half of all Black boys do not finish high school, and by the time they are in their 30s, almost six in ten Black high school dropouts will have spent time in prison.”

The bad statistics concerning Black men go on and on. Half of all Black men in their 20s are unemployed, and more young Black men are in prison than in college.

“Empowering Black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” NUL President Marc H. Morial told reporters at the National Press Club. 

“Ensuring their future is critical, not just for the African American community, but for the prosperity, health, and well-being of the entire American family.”

Black males are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as White males, and nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with their average jail sentences 10 months longer than those of White men. In addition, Black males between the ages of 15 and 34 are nine times more likely than Whites to be killed by firearms, and nearly eight times as likely to have AIDS.

As a solution to the problems, the report recommends universal early-childhood education; all-male schools which emphasize mentoring programs and longer class hours; more “second chance” programs for dropouts and former offenders; a restoration of the Summer Jobs Program; and an effort to convince children that education pays dividends later in life.

The NUL report bears witness to the condition of the Black man and the conspiracy to destroy Black males. Some have argued that the conspiracy to destroy the Black male is a “theory,” however, the scripture of the Bible gives proof of the reality of a plan to destroy the male child.

During the time of Moses, the Pharaoh of that day issued a decree to destroy all of the male children of Israel, as well as during the time of the birth of Jesus, when King Herod issued a decree to kill all of the boy babies to stop the birth of The Messiah.

The conspiracy and plan to target the Black male is best expressed in the Bible in Exodus 1:10, wherein Pharaoh states “Come let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and join onto our enemy and come against us in war.”

Although the NUL report stated there are solutions, but they don’t operate on a large enough scale, the report, however, fails to reflect the decades of work and admired results achieved by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Min. Farrakhan toured the country, alerting young Black men to a planned genocide against them by the U.S. government through his “Stop the Killing” tour.

This series of lectures was aimed at informing the community, and young Black men in particular, of the government’s plan to target young Black men for destruction. It was also during this period that Min. Farrakhan worked with youth gangs to help promote peace, and with rappers in the hip hop community to help decrease conflict.

In the mid-1990s, Min. Farrakhan launched another national tour entitled “Men Only Meetings” where he again alerted Black males of the government’s plan to promote a negative image of the Black man in the U.S. and in the world as a “menace to society.” This image, according to Min. Farrakhan, was largely promoted through movies and other negative imagery to set up the Black male for destruction.

It was during these series of men only meetings that Min. Farrakhan spoke of A Million-Man March that he began to mobilize for in 1995. The Million Man March was the most successful mobilization of Black men in U.S. history, when more than two million men rallied on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on October 16, 1995.

Growing out of the Million Man March, more Black men voted in the 1996 election than had ever voted before, and tens of thousands of Black children were adopted by families headed by Black males.

“We must close the jobs gap. We must close the education gap. We must close the high school graduation gap. But I suggest to you, that we’ve got to close—as Senator Obama says in his foreword—the empathy gap. We’ve got to close the gap of concern in this nation today,” said Mr. Morial.

  Explanations of black juvenile homicides in the 1980s that focus on the “super-predator” theory have no basis in fact. Justice Department data show that the entire rise in such homicides for the period 1984-1994 was related to firearms, as has been the decline in homicides beginning in 1995. Thus, the lethality of young offenders increased by having access to guns, rather than there being a new “breed” of young killers. Further, if the 15-19-year olds who were committing violent crimes in the late 1980s were actually“super-predators,” then they should have displayed these tendencies in the early 1980s as well, when they were in the 10-14 age range. Data for this period, though, show no indication of that (FBI-3, Crime in the United States, 1996, 1997).

This therefore lends support to the explanation that the greater availability of firearms, much of it related to the drug trade, was the primary source of the increase in violence.  Criminologist Alfred Blumstein has conducted prominent analyses of the overall racial composition of the prison population. In an examination of the 1991 state prison population, he concluded that 76% of the higher black rate of imprisonment could be accounted for by higher rates of arrest for serious offenses. While this held true for most crimes, the critical exception in this regard was drug offenses, which will be detailed further below. The remaining 24% of disparity might be explained by criminal histories, racial bias, or other factors.

Offenses by blacks are more likely to lead to arrest than those of whites. While the self reported involvement of adolescent males represents a 3:2 black/white differential, the arrest ratio is 4:1.

While there are no dramatic differences in the degree to which blacks and whites become involved in offending at some point, blacks are nearly twice as likely to continue offending into their twenties. The key variable in this regard is the adoption of adult roles. Thus, among young adults who are employed or living in a stable relationship there are no significant differences in the persistence of offending by race.

Research on sentencing in a number of jurisdictions has concluded that disparity based on race does in fact occur. One of the more sophisticated such studies examined case processing and sentencing outcomes for persons arrested for a felony offense in New York State for the years 1990-92.  Controlling for factors including prior criminal history, gender and county, the researchers found that for the more serious offenses, there was relatively little difference in sentencing, although it was estimated that 300 black and Hispanic offenders who received prison terms would not have had they been white.

For property offenses and misdemeanors, though, minorities were considerably more likely to receive jail terms.

Sources:

(Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth, “Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74 (fall 1983): 661-753.

Stephen Klein, Joan Petersilia, and Susan Turner, “Race and Imprisonment Decisions in California,” Science,

(February 16, 1990).

John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson, “Criminal Inequality in America: Patterns and Consequences,” in John Hagan and Ruth D. Peterson, Crime and Inequality, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 28.

The key issue in this regard appears to lie in the use of discretion by the courts when sentencing offenders. Violent offenders, regardless of their race or ethnicity, are quite likely to be sentenced to prison.

But for less serious offenders where there is an option, but no obligation, to sentence an offender to prison, prosecutors and judges are making decisions in each case about whether an offender will receive six months in jail, for example, or be required to enter a treatment program and make restitution to a victim.

It would be a mistake simply to attribute the results of such studies to prosecutorial and judicial racist beliefs; in some jurisdictions a significant number of prosecutors and judges are minorities prosecuting and sentencing other minorities to terms of incarceration. The results instead may reflect the degree to which offenders bring different sets of resources with them to the court system. For example, do white offenders have greater access to private defense attorneys who can devote more time to their cases to try to convince prosecutors and judges that a jail or prison term is not warranted? Do they have greater access to expert psychiatric testimony or can they afford to subsidize placement in a substance abuse treatment program? Or, is unconscious racism at play: do whites speak in a language and manner that is more comfortable to the decision makers in the courtroom?

These questions have important implications for developing remedies for the racial disparities that are so prominent in the criminal justice system. While some might advocate that a solution to minority over-representation in the prison system would be to sentence more white offenders to prison, such an approach would be extremely costly and would not alleviate any of the harms suffered by minority communities.

The alternative approach is to examine the factors that enable white, or middle class, offenders to be sentenced to non-prison terms more frequently and to replicate those conditions for low-income people. For example, if middle class offenders have greater access to drug treatment resources, courts and communities could expand such services to make them accessible to a broader range of offenders. Additionally, greater resources could be devoted to indigent defense services, a proposal to which Attorney General Janet Reno has frequently called attention.

Since 1980, the “war on drugs” has been the most significant factor contributing to the rise of prison and jail populations. Drug policies have also had a disproportionate impact on African Americans and have exacerbated the racial disparities that already existed within the criminal justice system.* This has come about in two ways: first, drug offenses overall have increased as a proportion of the criminal justice population and, second, the proportion of African Americans among drug offenders has been increasing (James F. Nelson, Disparities in Processing Felony Arrests in New York State, 1990-92, Albany, N.Y.: Division of Criminal Justice Services, 1995).

From 1980 to 1995, drug arrests nationally nearly tripled from 581,000 to 1,476,000, thus bringing nearly a million additional drug cases to the court system each year. Over the course of this period, drug cases came to be treated much more harshly. Primarily as a result of mandatory sentencing policies adopted by all fifty states and the federal government, convicted drug offenders are now far more likely to be sentenced to prison than in the past. Justice Department data reveal that the chances of a drug arrestee being sentenced to prison rose by 447% between 1980 and 1992. 
Taken from:

The Crisis of the Young African American Male and the Criminal Justice System

Marc Mauer, Assistant Director

The Sentencing Project

Prepared for U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

April 15-16, 1999

Washington, D.C.

_____________________________________

The Hebrew midwives did not follow Pharaoh’s orders.  They knew this wasn’t about the survival of one gender over the other.  They did not allow their enemy’s agendas like “war between the sexes” and “feminists verses male chauvinists” to define their struggle and neither must Black African American, Brown and White Latino American, and yes-Asian American people. 

The Hebrew midwives demonstrated that they were as capable as the King of Egypt when it came to being crafty and shrewd in order to insure their people’s survival.  The Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson often says, “No one will save us, for us, but us.”  What the National Urban League and Minister Louis Farrakhan are doing and proposing is just one step in one right direction need to be taken.   But meanwhile the attempt to kill, to incarcerate, to disenfranchise, to mis-educate, to eliminate black boys and also brown boys continues.  Notwithstanding all the test tubes, invitro fertilization techniques, it takes the whole village, not one sex, one type, one class or one cultural competency, to make a community prosperous, strong and thriving.  

Stop the killing of our children!!