Celebrating Black History Month

1. In March 2008, the United Nation’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination condemned what it found to be racial disparities in the death penalty and in the sentencing of youth to life without parole for crimes committed when they were under 18, a practice the committee wants stopped. The committee called on authorities to take steps, including a freeze on the death penalty, to root out racial bias.
2. A 2007 Yale University of Law study revealed that African-American defendants receive death penalty at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims are white. In addition, killers of white victims are treated more severely than people who kill minorities, when it comes to deciding what charges to bring.
3. Since 1977, the overwhelming majority of death row defendants have been executed for killing white victims, although African-Americans make up about half of all homicide victims. African Americans account for one in three people executed since 1977.
4. The U.S. “war on drugs” disproportionately targets urban minority neighborhoods. Two national reports released in early 2008 found that although whites commit more drug offenses, African Americans are arrested and imprisoned on drug charges at much higher rates.
5. The increase in the annual number of black arrests was greater than in the annual number of white arrests: black drug arrests were 4.8 times greater in 2007 than in 1980.
6. The Human Rights Watch discovered that across 34 states studied, most drug offenders are white, yet a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman.
7. Studies of discrimination in housing markets reveal that African American or Latino/a testers experience some form of differential treatment roughly half of the time. Even the most conservative measures reveal that at least 25% of the time there will be discrimination in many important types of behavior by rental or real estate agents.