{"id":65135,"date":"2016-07-07T11:01:45","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T16:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=65135"},"modified":"2016-07-07T15:08:21","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T20:08:21","slug":"chart-of-the-week-63-of-white-people-are-wrong-about-ferguson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2016\/07\/07\/chart-of-the-week-63-of-white-people-are-wrong-about-ferguson\/","title":{"rendered":"When Force is Hardest to Justify, Victims of Police Violence Are Most Likely to be Black"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Pew study\u00a0found<\/a> that 63% of white and 20% of black people think that Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Darren Wilson was not about race. This week many people will probably say the same about two more black men killed by police, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.<\/p>\n

Those people are\u00a0wrong.<\/p>\n

African Americans are, in fact, far more likely to be killed by police. Among young men, blacks are 21 times more likely<\/a> to die at the hands of police than their white counterparts.<\/p>\n

But, are they more likely to precipitate police violence? \u00a0No. The opposite is true<\/a>. Police are more likely to kill black people regardless of what they are doing. In fact, “the less clear it is that force was necessary, the more likely the victim is to be black.”<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s data from the FBI.<\/p>\n

This question was also studied<\/a> by sociologist Lance Hannon. With an analysis of\u00a0over 950 non-justifiable homicides from police files, he tested whether black people were more likely to take actions that triggered their own murder. The answer was no.<\/em> He found no evidence that blacks were more likely than whites to engage in verbal or physical antecedents that explained their death.<\/p>\n

There is lots<\/a>, lots<\/a> more<\/a> evidence<\/a> if one bothers to go looking for it.<\/p>\n

Castile and Sterling, unlike Brown, were carrying weapons. People will try to use that fact to justify the police officer’s fatal aggression. But it doesn’t matter. Black men and women are killed disproportionately whether they are carrying weapons or not, whether carrying weapons is legal or not. Carrying weapons is, in fact, legal in both Minnesota and Louisiana, the states of this week’s killings. What they were carrying is no more illegal than Trayvon’s\u00a0pack of Skittles. Black people can’t carry guns safely; it doesn’t matter whether they are legal. Heck, they can’t carry Skittles safely. Because laws that allow open and concealed carry don’t apply the same way to them\u00a0as they do white people. No laws apply the same way to them.\u00a0The laws might be race neutral; America is not.<\/p>\n

Revised from 2014.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Pew study\u00a0found that 63% of white and 20% of black people think that Michael Brown’s death at the hands of Darren Wilson was not about race. This week many people will probably say the same about two more black men killed by police, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Those people are\u00a0wrong. African Americans are, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,233,55,23695,3920,283,250,285,1760,20063,23712,1757,133],"class_list":["post-65135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-death","tag-gender","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-race","tag-nation-united-states","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-guns","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity-violence","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/11\/1-45.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65135"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69094,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65135\/revisions\/69094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}