Researchers at the University of Virginia used the 2016 census to create a racial dot map of the United States. Every dot represents a citizen colour coded by ethnicity. Blue dots for white people, green for black, orange for Hispanic, red for Asian, brown for Native Americans and other ethnic groups. Racial segregation is immediately apparent.
This is Chicago, below is Los Angeles, followed by Washington DC
Libby Anne at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2018/12/the-most-sobering-thing-about-the-racial-dot-map.html?fbclid=IwAR2jRC4rVJV4I7gbP79GJcneLnzaf3etHjfi0O-sRGSyzlOp2fChoteLBPc&utm_source=quora&utm_medium=referral started looking at the bigger picture, focusing on predominantly white rural areas. She noticed peculiar patterns of clustered green dots representing black citizens in rural white America.
She took to Google Maps which explained green dot anomaly as the Clinton Correctional Facility in Clinton County, New York. A maximum security prison housing almost 3,000 adult males.
Here’s another one –
The Houtzdale Corrections Facility in Pennsylvania, opened in 1996 to house 1,597 inmates, now stuffed with 2,800 predominantly black green dot prisoners.
Libby Anne didn’t start with a list of correctional facilities. She looked at anomalies in the racial dot map and used Google Maps to understand what she was seeing. The pattern repeated itself over and over again all across America. In the words of Libby Anne –
“When activists talk about the criminalization of the African American male and the need for prison reform, this is what they’re talking about – an imprisoned population so racially unbalanced that you can find the locations of correctional facilities on a map that shows only demography and nothing else”
If justice is indeed blind, then it tells me that blacks are naughtier than others.
Or to some it could be interpreted as a display of power, or prejudice, or both. Or maybe even all three. OR—
—it could be that unlike magnets, like attracts like. (You know, folks of a feather flock together, stuff like that?)
Bollocks! What it means is private incarceration for profit in America culls black males to fill prison beds in accordance with contractual obligations. Absolutely disgusting, shameful and insidious!
Didn’t I cover that one too? Bummer … memo to self: write better, ya dum’ dog!
But yes, I do get your point. (Can you actually prove it, or is that one of those axiomatic things?)
Oh I can prove it! Don’t get me started!
Did you know that private for profit U.S. prisons have contracts with the state they’re in guaranteeing occupancy? If law enforcement doesn’t fill beds the state has to pay for profit prison corporations for empty beds.
That sounds like a good motivator to fill those beds. The US is a democracy, so of course in The Land Of The Free something can sort this lot out to the satisfaction of the majority of voters, no?
NO!!!! For starters America is a Republic, not a democracy. The 2018 Democracy index ranks the U.S. as a “flawed democracy” (in 25th place between Estonia and Cape Verde)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
Most Americans are utterly clueless about state/private for profit prison contracts. Law enforcement targets poor black men to fill beds, justice be damned!
It isn’t just Apartheid but slavery that’s alive, growing and profiting in Amerikkka.
Inmates earn an average of 17 cents an hour. Millions of prisoners are “employed” in everything from agriculture to manufacturing.
https://www.thenation.com/article/profits-prison-system/
Just remembered this ponder –
https://notestoponder.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/for-profit-prison-pot-ponder/
Dammit. Americans bleat so much about democracy and how they’re the biggest/best/etc Democracy in the world, I thought …
True democracy would decimate the U.S. economy. America talks a good game, but plays by very different rules.
Don’t we all, us ‘democracies’?
Obviously all democracies are flawed to some degree. Trouble is America super-sizes everything under the guise of constitutional freedom. Corporate money finances political careers, politicians are beholden to private corporate interests not the people.
Cherchez la buck … hell, we all do it. But we aren’t all con-artists.
There’s no “like” button for your comment so I’m writing it out: LIKE!!!
Mac’s onboard dictionary—
“republic |riˈpəblik| noun
a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
• archaic a group with a certain equality between its members.”
So how do ‘We, The People’ wield that power? In New Zealand we’re democratic too — we elect our dictators as well.
I think that properly done it would take far longer to remove them from office legally than simply to sit out their lawful period.
Clever, them law-makers. I think there’s fodder here for an entire post?
Agreed! You nailed it. 🙂
Profound and rather disturbing.
This will happen when people are duped into believing that there is someone who is good enough to rule over them.
They did — and their councils have been burning folks at the stake ever since (literally too often, metaphorically these days).