Sources report, if you are a Black person living in America, then this headline from Monday’s New York Times may be alarming but not shocking: 1.5 Million Missing Black Men.
What it addresses is the number of Black men aged 25-54 who are missing from daily life in our country, mostly due to early death or incarceration.
New York Times states:
They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.
According to the Census Bureau, there were 7.046 million black men 25 to 54 who were not incarcerated in 2010 and 8.503 million black women in this category. The difference between these two figures leads to our headline of 1.5 million missing black men.Demographers refer to the 25-to-54 age group as prime age, a term this post will use frequently.
Using census data, we estimated that about 625,000 prime-age black men were imprisoned, compared with 45,000 black women. This gap — of 580,000 — accounts for more than one-third of the overall gap.It is the result of sharply different incarceration rates for black men and any other group. The rate for prime-age black men is 8.2 percent, compared with 1.6 percent for non-black men, 0.5 percent for black women and 0.2 percent for non-black women.
The missing-men phenomenon began growing in the middle decades of the 20th century, and each government census over the past 50 years has recorded at least 120 prime-age black women outside of jail for every 100 black men. But the nature of the gap has changed in recent years.
Since the 1990s, death rates for young black men have dropped more than rates for other groups, notes Robert N. Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both homicides and H.I.V.-related deaths, which disproportionately afflict black men, have dropped. Yet the prison population has soared since 1980. In many communities, rising numbers of black men spared an early death have been offset by rising numbers behind bars.
It does appear as if the number of missing black men is on the cusp of declining, albeit slowly. Death rates are continuing to fall, while the number of people in prisons — although still vastly higher than in other countries — has also fallen slightly over the last five years.
But the missing-men phenomenon will not disappear anytime soon. There are more missing African-American men nationwide than there are African-American men residing in all of New York City — or more than in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Washington and Boston, combined.
ForeverMeah says...
