When I was doing research for How the Irish Became White, I looked at the prison population of Philadelphia from 1815 to 1824, and found, to no one’s surprise, that black people made up a far higher proportion of the prison population than they did in the city as a whole. However, when I controlled for income, the disparity practically disappeared: Of those in the poorest third, the group from whom the prison population was drawn, one out of twelve men, roughly the same among black as white, was in prison. (Routledge 1995, 44-48)
Were they in prison because they were black or because they were poor? The question is misleading. For historic reasons, a greater proportion of black people than whites were poor; even without “race” discrimination by the legal system, they would have gone to prison in disproportionate numbers. Yet it was their background as former slaves that led to their being classified as members of a distinct “race.” Do you walk to work or carry your lunch?
We may be facing a similar dilemma with regard to police killings today. Black people make up approximately 12 percent of the US population, but they make up about 25 percent of those killed by police. Simple enough, it would appear: they are being killed at a rate more than twice their representation. However, according to one study, the situation is similar to what I found in my study of Philadelphia: classification of people by “race” conceals an important aspect of truth. Appearance and essence?
The study “reviews all the data available on police shootings for the year 2017, and analyzes it based on geography, income, and poverty levels, as well as race.” Its presentation can be daunting; here I attempt to present its most important findings in a way that renders them accessible to the ordinary reader. For the most part I have reproduced the words of the study. In a few places I have reworded the text, but I have made no substantive changes. I encourage readers to consult the original, at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/20/kil1-d20.html
The study divides the U.S. into zones where police killings took place and where they did not, and compares them.
According to the US Census Bureau, 328 million people reside in the United States. Non-Hispanic whites make up 60.7 percent, black or African American 13.4 percent, and Hispanics or Latino 18.1 percent of the population. The annual median household income in 2016 dollars amounts to $55,322 and the percentage of the population living in poverty stands at 12.3 percent.
The region [where police killings took place] accounts for 91,526,100 people. In other words, slightly more than one-quarter of the US population lives in a city or county where a police killing took place, and conversely, just under three-quarters live in cities or counties that were free of such killings.
The population [of the region where police killings took place] had significantly different demographics from the USA as a whole. Non-Hispanic whites made up 44.5 percent, blacks 18.6 percent and Hispanics 26.7 percent of this region. The median household income is slightly lower at $52,218 per annum.
If one compares the poverty rates in the two regions, the disparity is even more stark. The poverty rate is 19.5 percent in what might be called the police killing zone. It is only 9.5 percent, less than half that rate, in the rest of the country.
There are significant variations from state to state and from population centers like metropolises to small rural communities in how the demographics are configured. The Southeast states have large black populations in both urban and rural areas, the Midwest is predominantly white, particularly outside city centers, and the Southwest has a very high Hispanic population. Metropolitan centers have higher minority populations while rural communities have a preponderance of white people. There are also considerable socioeconomic variations within these regions.
Police violence is focused overwhelmingly on men lowest on the socio-economic ladder: in rural areas outside the South, predominantly white men; in the Southwest, disproportionately Hispanic men; in mid-size and major cities, disproportionately black men. Significantly, in the rural South, where the population is racially mixed, white men and black men are killed by police at nearly identical rates.
Blacks are killed in vastly disproportionate numbers in larger urban centers and continue to be over-represented in smaller urban centers. However, half of all police killings occur in rural areas where the majority is non-Hispanic white, though these areas represent a much smaller fraction of the national population. It is here where white deaths begin to “catch up” to black deaths, and ultimately surpass them.
In the state of Alabama, there were 25 people killed. Fourteen (56 percent) were identified as white, seven (28 percent) were black, and 1 (4 percent) was Hispanic. The actual state demographics are 65.8 percent white, 26.8 percent black and 4.2 percent Hispanic. There was no “preference” by the police for blacks as targets over whites. Similar “neutrality” by the police was found in Mississippi, an equally backward state from the standpoint of its history. The racial explanation of police violence falls apart in precisely the locations where it should be most blatant.
The number of whites killed by police in rural areas, 292, is just about exactly twice the number of blacks killed by police in urban areas, 149. The income and poverty rates in the two areas are comparable: both white and black victims of police violence live in lower-income working-class areas characterized by much higher than average poverty rates.
Poor whites are in essence invisible to the national discussion on police killings. The present data show that what whites and blacks who are killed by police have in common is poverty.
The authors of the study believe that “enormous resources have been mobilized to spread the ‘race, not class’ mythology of police killings.” They attribute the invisibility of poor whites to “pseudo-left groups [who] promote racialist conceptions to defend the capitalist economic system in which their own material interests are rooted,” specifically naming DSA and Black Lives Matter, which has gained the support of the Ford Foundation, Nike and other ruling-class institutions.
Assuming the survey is accurate, that must be at least part of the truth. Are there any other explanations? Why haven’t poor whites rioted, as black people have in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere?
Thanks Noel you bring up some good points.
I don’t think statistics fully capture the role that policing plays to reproduce race and racism in America. For example, I think its really easy to look at the statistics and focus solely on killings which is really an egregious form of violence but doesn’t really take into account everyday forms of violence (often times more subtle and less direct than homicide) and also the maintenance of order which is central to the role of the police. Its not to say that poor whites don’t experience police violence (clearly they do) but I am not sure their day to day experience with this arm of the state is the same way as non-white folks, especially black and brown. By that I mean the ways in which police enforce social order–stopping you while you drive, asking you why you are in a certain neighborhood, etc. Poor whites are not stopped by the police because they are white.
I guess I’d want to ask what is the experience of poor rural whites with the police. Do people call the police on poor whites for just being there, are they followed around, stopped for any reason, told what neighborhood they don’t belong in? Because when riots have occurred in America the police killing has been the last straw in a way–there have been long simmering tensions between police and residents that then finally erupted. Also the police in many ways are the visible form of tension and control in addition to other things happening at work, school, etc. So when black and brown people rioted it was against police but also their status in society. What is this day to day experience with the police like for poor rural whites? How do poor whites view their status in society? And is the police one of the main ways in which they understand their status?
I can’t speak for rural America (Id wager something similar is obviously happening) but in urban cities, policing is one of the main ways in which racial order and class order is enforced. In the Bronx, black and brown teenagers are made keenly aware when they cross into largely Irish and Italian neighborhoods. If not by the residents who call the police by the police themselves. I’ve met teenagers that are followed and asked by the police “what are you doing in this neighborhood?” I guess Id like to know more about what this day to day experience with police is for rural whites in Alabama. Because while the focus is always on homicides and killings (and righteously so) there are even larger forms of day to day violence that happen that inform how groups of people understand not only the police but themselves and where they fall in the social order.
Also it would be interesting to see the breakdown of police violence against whites in Alabama. Another lesser well known fact about police violence is that many people with a variety of mental health issues are targeted and killed. I’d have to look at the statistic but its a great number. I wonder if this is also part of it as well.
Also lastly, on the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission many argued that things have not gotten better–issues around school desegregation, income inequality, police brutality etc are still really greater for black americans (authors called into question what had really changed) but yet we have witnessed only two major riots (baltimore and ferguson).
Eye opening. Me not being a statistician or academic I await a rebuttal if one is to be made.
Two alternative answers to your question that come to mind:
1) for the same reason poor blacks didn’t riot for decades, despite rates of black death by police being higher in the past;
2) because they are more isolated, socially and geographically.
Something I wrote on this a while ago:
https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/article/view/3030/2651
True, but that is a separate question and the issue that Noel is pointing out which is why don’t poor rural whites outrage/protest or riot over policing killings if they are so deeply affected still remains. When have poor whites protested police violence that has erupted in a full scale riot (or at least major protest) unless it wasn’t a direct confrontation with I don’t know union officials or private guards hired by bosses? For me that has to do with the fact that poor whites still do not experience their status in American society as inextricably bound with policing in the way that black people do (regardless of why black people have not rioted more or when they have done so etc etc). Yes poor white people do get killed by the police but they don’t experience policing day to day as an assault on their status in society. The police is not public enemy in terms of controlling and managing their status and order in society. White teenagers are not going to get stopped and asked “What are you doing in this neighborhood?” unless by chance that they are parked in the projects and they are driving in Westchester or New Jersey license plates. For me social isolation and geography is not the answer or explanation for why poor whites have not protested/rioted.
I guess Id have to ask to tease apart social isolation also not because I agree that is part and parcel of why whites have not protested police violence but because I do think that on some level profound alienation (in the ways of how Marx meant it from species-being) is really an important aspect of whiteness. But Id have to think more on this.
I agree with your comments above about harassment and non-lethal violence, I think Fryer found that conditional on a arrest/stop black people were less likely to be shot but more likely to be roughed up, plus there’s the stop as harassment, etc. Its also true that whites today are more likely to trust the police, but I don’t know if anyone has broken that down by class. As for anti-police riots, I think there are white examples but most are probably labor-related. But again I think the question is ill-posed if we ask “why don’t poor whites riot against police like poor blacks?”, since the fact is poor blacks very rarely riot against police. The exceptional moments when they do seem rooted in the unique history of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. It’s interesting that the last wave of anti-police protest was triggered not by police violence but by the acquittal of George Zimmerman, evoking a broader experience of racism.
Useful rebuttal at Black Agenda Report “Yes, White People Are Also Killed by the Mass Black Incarceration Regime”:
This bizarre and ill-conceived study serves as a reminder that much of what passes for a “left” in the white settler states and Europe is useless to any movement against racial oppression. Were it not so tiny and ineffectual, the WSWS’s handlers in the Socialist Equality Party would be downright dangerous to Black people. The study looks at police killings data compiled by the Washington Post, the Guardian and Fatal Encounters surveyors. Although the WSWS researchers concede that Blacks are, on a nationwide basis, 2.24 times more likely to be killed by police than whites, they contend that such police killings are limited to just one-quarter of the country, and that three-quarters of the nation’s population “live in cities or counties that were free of such killings.” The WSWS then proceeds to treat the “police killing zone” and the rest of the U.S. as separate countries. The “killing zone” nation is more heavily Black (18.6 percent) and Hispanic (26.7 percent) and less non-Hispanic white (only 44.5 percent) than the rest of the country. The researchers further calculate that the “killing zone” poverty rate is more than twice as high as the rest of the U.S.: 19.5 percent versus 9.5 percent. Voila!: the study concludes that “what whites and blacks who are killed by police have in common is poverty.”… Yes, it’s a big country, with lots of poor people of all races, who are more likely to be killed by police than are richer Americans. But that doesn’t mean they were killed because they were poor, only that they were not rich enough — or sane enough — to escape being victimized by cops. But class-conscious cops can also be racists, and all U.S. cops function in a system that has been purposely organized to contain, control and terrorize specifically Black populations, especially poor Blacks. The numbers show, incontrovertibly, that lethal police violence is most concentrated in Black, poor urban neighborhoods, which have for nearly a half century been the epicenter of what Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow”: the post-Civil Rights and Black Power era Mass Black Incarceration State. … A long-delayed grassroots movement finally emerged to confront the Mass Black Incarceration regime and its killer cops, under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter. The ruling class has attempted to co-opt this movement ever since, with varying degrees of success. But the WSWS critique of Black Lives Matter is bogus and ideologically driven, with numbers sprinkled in to give the illusion of social science. WSWS is opposed to independent Black political activity, including Black political self-defense against state oppression, which the WSWS brand of Trotskyists deems as narrow nationalist and objectively (or even consciously!) in league with the capitalist rulers. Which would be a great slander, if the WSWS were considered as serious Marxists. But, they are not. Although WSWS does some good work, they are also, unfortunately, crazy.
A textbook example of circular reasoning: 1) The writer starts with the certainty that the system “has been purposely organized to contain, control and terrorize specifically Black populations, especially poor Blacks”; 2) Statistics show that among the poor as high a proportion of whites are killed by police as blacks; 3) Unable to refute the statistics, and unwilling to rethink the reasons why the police kill people, he calls the study “bizarre and ill-conceived,” “bogus and ideologically driven,” and denounces “Trotskyism.” How do I know that God exists? Because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is the Word of God (and “Trotskyism” is the word of the Devil).
I would like to see statistics weighted for the number of felony interactions with the police. One has to consider the number of individual citizen/police interactions rather than just the population data alone. Some people of one demographic may never interact with police while members of a different demographic are likely to experience twenty or more interactions with police in their lifetime. Those in the latter demographic would be far more likely to experience a range of police behaviors than those with fewer interactions.
Thereby the statistical analysis must take into account these windows for violence occur. Without them there could be no deaths by police except by stray bullet or other misadventure.