[INDEX | NATIONAL | WORLD | PERSPECTIVE | COLUMNS | MONEY | ENTERTAINMENT | HEALTH | TECH | LETTERS | SUBSCRIBE]

FinalCall.com News

National News
Genocide of Blacks continues in America
By Saeed Shabazz
Staff Writer
Updated Dec 22, 2003 - 11:12:00 PM

UNITED NATIONS (FinalCall.com) - In 1951, William L. Robinson and Paul Robeson petitioned the United Nations, charging the United States government with the high crime of genocide against Black Americans. In 1964, Minister Malcolm X Shabazz of the Nation of Islam addressed the Organization of African Unity, also charging the U.S. government with violating the human rights of Blacks in America.

In 1996, Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan used the first anniversary of the Million Man March to demand that the UN take action against the U.S. for the "genocide" of Blacks in North America. He made his historic speech in front of the UN building in Manhattan.

In 2003, observers and analysts say that the genocide of Blacks in America continues to spin out of control.

Young Black men are 80 percent of many prison populations, although they constitute only six percent of the U.S. population. Black men constitute 45 percent of those on death row, according to the Department of Justice. All White juries have convicted close to 40 percent of Black death-row inmates.

Johnnie Hunter, national director of the Life Education and Research Network, writes that the Black community has lost 12,000,000 babies due to abortions.

In 1991, 95,064 Black men died before the age of 69, while 10,430 Black men died from homicide the same year, according to author Robert Johnson, who wrote an article for the Journal of African Men, entitled "Are Blacks experiencing genocide in the U.S.?"

"Indirect genocide can be experienced in part in the self-destructive adaptations of victim groups to the deprivations of life inflicted upon them by the larger society," Mr. Johnson said. "In this situation, the victim group appears to be the cause of its own problems and the role of the larger social conditions is dis-avowed or ignored entirely," Mr. Johnson added. He continued by saying that other sources of increased vulnerability in the Black community, such as those related to poor physical health, are dismissed on the premise that the culprit is the lifestyle preferred by Blacks—not the presence of poverty and racism.

David Horowitz, in a 1997 article in the Salon magazine, said: "Surveys show that a large number in the African American community is indeed convinced that Whites—with their government behind them—are plotting genocide against Blacks through the distribution of crack and the AIDS virus."

Hypertension causes 20 percent of Black deaths in America, twice the figure of Whites, according to a Scientific American article in 1999. Hypertension is the technical term for high blood pressure, which contributes to heart disease, stroke and kidney failure in 35 percent of Black Americans. According to the 2000 Census, the Black population stands at 12.32 percent.

The article said that the popular explanation for the hypertension disparity between Blacks and Whites is due to the fact that people of African descent are "intrinsically susceptible" to high blood pressure because of some vaguely defined aspect of their genetic makeup.

But, the article said, scientists have known for sometime that the rate of hypertension in rural West Africa is lower than any other place in the world. So, why then do people of African descent in the U.S. and the United Kingdom have some of the highest rates of hypertension in the world?

"It suggests that there is something about the surroundings or way of life of European and American Blacks—rather than a genetic factor," the magazine said.

"There is little dispute that Blacks in North America and Europe face a unique kind of stress—racial discrimination, and the long-term effects of racism on blood pressure remains unknowing," the article said.

According to a 2002 study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 80 percent of Blacks believe that they could be used as guinea pigs in medical experiments, such as the infamous Tuskegee University Syphilis experiment, which many see as a form of genocide. The CDC says this explains why only 39 percent of elderly Blacks (65 + years) have been vaccinated for influenza, compared to 60 percent of Whites in the same age group.

So, the question begs answering: is it genocide or something else?

The 2000 Census reports that 27.3 percent of Blacks do not have health insurance compared to 3.5 percent of Whites.

Is it genocide when, as the Justice Policy Institute reports that as of 2002, there were 791,640 Black men in jail and 603,000 in higher education? One half of the Black male dropouts compared to one in 10 White dropouts have prison records. The census figures show that 43.91 percent of Blacks are in state and federal prisons, compared to 34.72 percent of the White population. Whites constitute 69.13 percent of the U.S. population, while Latinos are 12.55 percent.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) said that maybe the answer lies in the fact that state spending on corrections grew at a rate six times that of the spending on education in the period from 1985 to 2000; that meant a decrease of 24 percent for education, compared with a 166 percent increase for corrections.

The NAACP said the negative impact of the prison issue in the Black community means that 3.5 million adult Blacks do not have the right to vote because of imprisonment; being on parole or on probation. That also means that tens of thousands of Black people are denied the right of a jury of their peers.

FCN is a distributor (and not a publisher) of content supplied by third parties. Original content supplied by FCN and FinalCall.com News is Copyright 2012 FCN Publishing, FinalCall.com. Content supplied by third parties are the property of their respective owners.