My latest reading of Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
focused on crime. Hacker states that “one out of every five black men
will spend some part of his life behind bars” (page 195). That is not a
majority of African-American men, but it is still a significant amount.
And this 2013 article is about a report that argues that the number could become one in three, if current incarceration trends continue.
Why is this the case, according to Hacker? For one, there is the
factor of poverty. Granted, most African-Americans are not in poverty,
as most African-American men are not in prison. But about a fourth of
African-Americans are in poverty, and that is a significant amount.
When people are poor and have few options, one path that they may choose
is crime.
Second, Hacker contends that there are African-American men who are
resentful of African-American women, and that this could account for a
number of black-on-black rapes. More than once in this book, Hacker
cites statistics that indicate that African-American women on average do
better than African-American men economically, professionally, and
academically, and Hacker’s proposed reason for this is that white
society believes that African-American women are better at gelling with
white ways of doing things: they are supposedly more accommodating, they
are more likely to sit down and be quiet in the classroom, etc. Hacker
states on page 192 that this “can create social divisions and stir
sexual tensions”, and that “Men have always sought to bring down women
whose ambitions or achievements threaten male esteem.”
Third, African-American men who commit crimes are likely to commit
those crimes with visibility, increasing the likelihood that they will
get caught. Rather than breaking into a house in the suburbs, for
example, they would try to rob someone on the street. And, fourth, much
of the criminal justice system is white. Hacker asks how a white
person would feel if he drove into a black neighborhood and accidentally
hit an African-American child, and the only people in the courtroom who
are white are he and his lawyer. Wouldn’t the defendant feel as if the
system were biased against him, in that case? Well, that’s how a
number of African-Americans feel.
Of course, conservatives can come back with answers to this: that
there are many poor people who don’t commit crimes, and many rich people
who do, and that the African-American crime and incarceration rate in
the 1930′s was much lower than it is today. Hacker acknowledges all of
this, even if he may not believe that it thoroughly undermines his
overall argument and observations.