Young Black males are at greater risk for harm from their peers than from the police or white civilians.
There’s a lot we don’t know about how many people have actually been killed at police hands in the United States, thanks to woefully inadequate transparency and federal record-keeping. But there’s one thing we do know: Among those we know were shot by police, Black teens were 21 times more likely to be shot dead than their white counterparts. A report by ProPublica revealed that the 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that Blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police. If whites were killed at the same ratio, there would have been another 185 white deaths during that three-year period, just in that narrow age range. In fact, Black people are much more likely to get killed in general, and not just by other Black people. One would think that African-Americans being at far higher risk for being killed in general would lead law enforcement to take pains to protect them fully and completely — not use this as a lame and non-factual excuse to justify having police do the killing instead of someone else.
Black people just want to live off the government instead of working.
The largest group of food-stamp recipients is white; 45 percent of all beneficiaries are children; and most people eligible for Medicaid are families with children in which at least one person in the household has a job. Despite ample and objective statistics showing that most welfare recipients are white families with children, the stereotype of the welfare queen persists. As for food stamps, whites made up 48 percent of recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2012, while Blacks were 26 percent of recipients and Hispanics were 21 percent. “You’re talking about the working poor, and it’s a pretty sympathetic group,” said Tom Perriello of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “They’re not welfare queens driving Cadillacs. These are people trying to pay the bills and keep the lights on.” The connection of Black people to these entitlement programs by white elites has been an insidious and cynical way of building opposition to them among poor whites — the group who actually benefits from them more than any other group.
