User:JacknRuby/Draft:Anti-Black Violence

Anti-Black violence is the physical, social, and/or psychological harm of a Black person or group. Anti-Black violence in the United States is rooted in the country’s settler-colonial history, through which white settlers laid a foundation of white supremacy. Anti-Black violence is enacted by racist individuals, structures, and policies that seek to maintain a white supremacist racial hierarchy. Victims of anti-Black violence are the individuals the violence is enacted upon and Black family members, community members, and future generations that are traumatized by the violent act. Over time, anti-Black violence has not gone away, but instead permeated into an ever-growing range of areas. Resistance to anti-Black violence has become a tenet of the Black experience in the United States.

Physical
Physical anti-Black violence has taken the form of lynchings, race riots, rape, sexual assault, whipping, beatings, arson, and murder. Police brutality includes injury, negligence, maltreatment and killing. The percent of individuals who are Black that are killed by police is higher than the percent they make up in the U.S. population. Police officers use force and weapons against Black Americans more often than they do with other racial groups.

Systemic
State-sanctioned police brutality and vigilante violence are systemic forms of anti-Black violence in the United States. White vigilantes were almost never punished under the law for committing violent crimes against Black Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More recently, many police officers who have killed Black Americans have not been punished under the law or through their departments.

Many political and economic strategies have relied on and caused anti-Black violence, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Southern Strategy, voter suppression under Jim Crow, the War on Drugs, redlining, and predatory lending.

Hyper-surveillance of Black individuals and communities is another form of systemic violence that results in both physical and psychological harm. This is often practiced alongside segregation and over-policing, such as in the killing of Michael Brown. It can also be perpetrated by individuals, as seen in the killing of Trayvon Martin, or by governmental agencies like in the case of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program.

Environmental
Environmental racism can be an act of anti-Black violence because it causes physical harm to Black individuals and communities. Race is a major determinant in the likelihood of environmental areas being used for storage and disposal of toxic waste. Race has been factored into the selection of landfill sites in the South. More recently, there were substantiated accusations of environmental racism associated with the Flint Water Crisis, in a case where political inaction led to detrimental health outcomes for a majority Black community.