BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Racial Oppression is Why Black Men Are Missing!

by KenRay SunYaRu

“To a great extent, the personality of the African-American today has been shaped by our desires to escape the memory of the slave experience, to deny its existence. We don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to come to terms with it. We don’t want to re-experience it psychologically. And therefore, our lives become defined by eternal escape and avoidance of reality and of history and of knowledge of who we are and how we came to be who and what we are. And consequently, we cannot act upon the reality of our history and we therefore guide our behavior and define ourselves in terms of a fantasy as history, and a misinterpretation of reality.” – Dr. Amos Wilson

Having awareness of Black history through deep study as a Black man, I understand clearly that the force removal of Black men ‘intentional repression and causative premature medical mortalities’ has been and is an integral aspect of America’s institutional racism.

Regarding Black men on slave plantations, historians cite that Black men were constantly sold and relocated ‘removed’ from their families due to their high value. Historians also cite that Black male slaves were removed due to health-related deaths, citing that sixty-two percent of slave deaths occurred in the male population.

Indeed, Black male salve departures due to ‘sales and sicknesses’ left a prevalence of single mothers and children on plantations; male children were also frequently taken from slave mothers. When you look at the mass removal of Black men and boys from their families and communities today it’s no different from the days of our Ancestors enslavement.

Current research shows that in hundreds of predominantly Black neighborhoods in the U.S. there are only about three Black men for every five black women under age 65. This disproportionate gender imbalance reflects factors including mass incarceration and high mortality.

According to figures from the ‘Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Black males are imprisoned in state and federal facilities at six times the rate of white men, and about 25 times that of Black women. Regarding Black male youth ‘children’ research shows they are almost five times as likely as their white male peers to be held in juvenile facilities.

Many Blacks have been led to believe that the single biggest driver behind the absence of many Black men is mass incarceration, but this is not the case at all! According to Nina T. Harawa a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of California Los Angeles and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, states that:

“A common, but misleading, narrative about the Black family is that it is broken - fractured by wayward and self-destructive Black men who have gone missing, either dead or in prison. This supposed breakdown of the Black family has been blamed for any number of ills, from high school dropout rates to entrenched poverty. The reality, however, is that while bullets, prison bars, and criminal injustice do pull too many men from the arms of their partners and children, Black men who “follow the rules,” hold a steady job, and advance from young adulthood into middle age will still face systemic threats to their health and wellbeing. Many chronic diseases hit Black men harder, younger, and more frequently than they do other groups. Homicide does not even crack the top eight causes of death for Black men in middle-age, but each year, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and diabetes collectively shave off nearly one and a half years of life for every 100 Black men under the age of 65 - more than twice their toll on White men.”

To Black women, many of you all raise the question where are the Black men at? Many of you all say they are in prison – dating or marrying white women. No! The main reason Black men are missing is because they are in the ‘cemetery’ due to dying prematurely ‘disproportionately’ from chronic diseases.

Studying our history as Black folks shows us clearly from past to present that the removal ‘absence’ of Black men from their families and communities has been due to the pathologies and deadliness of white racist oppression.