Years of peaceful protest met with hatred and scorn - The systemic persecution, enslavement and injustice of African Americans.

This country was truly founded on the destruction of property to send a message to the injustices of the reigning power.

“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccesful rebellions indeed generally establish the incroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them” - Thomas Jefferson

The black incarceration rate is 640% higher (per 100,000 people) than the rate for whites. This systematic racism in the criminal justice system is a truly horrible problem. It's not about which side you're on, Democrats or Republicans. It's about the corrupt criminal justice system that spans the entire country.

Sadly, the disproportionately harsh treatment towards black people is deeply entrenched throughout American history. Rioting and destruction are never the first solution, they are the culmination of accrued injustices. Let me give you a few examples.

You had the ramifications of the Black Codes, which limited the ability of black Americans to own property, participate in commerce, buy or lease land, or freely move in public spaces (Wormser, “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow”). The Black Codes were drafted on the heels of a massive organized labor shortage/slowdown on the part of the mistreated black workers, thus causing an attempt to prosecute black vagrancy, i.e. the use of leisure time to spend with family as well as assertion of labor rights (Cohen, “At Freedom’s Edge”).

By 1909, every single state in the US (except Tennessee) had passed more severe laws aimed at punishing vagrancy amongst the black population and restricting their labor rights (Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows”). This was a continuation of forced labor, decades after the end of slavery, and was only publicly identified as such for the first time in 1907 by the Attorney General in “Peonage Matters” (Cohen, “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South”).

After the formation of the Civil Rights Section of 1939, these incidences of involuntary servitude were beginning to actually be prosecuted. Southern vagrancy laws stemming from culling the rights of freed slaves and their descendants were in effect until the decision of Papachristou v. Jacksonville, which was decided in 1972, almost a decade after voting privileges were awarded (https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-papachristou-v-city-of-jacksonville).

Now let’s talk about the capacity for black Americans to live their lives. In the first half of the 20th century, banks would assess risk on default through the redlining of African American neighborhoods. Residents of these neighborhoods were denied housing loans, thus causing their communities to degrade and decay, while white neighborhoods flourished and prospered (https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america).

The New Deal’s FHA did not permit most blacks to receive the same guaranteed housing loan rights as white Americans, and reforms were only begun in the 1970s, and continued to be reformed and improved through the Obama administration.

Black neighborhoods across the country have a preponderance of the condition known as a “food desert”, in which local grocery stores are independently owned with high prices, and thus have to travel to other neighborhoods and cities simply to buy food for their family.

The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded black servants and agricultural workers, due to extensive lobbying by Southern white politicians and businessmen; the Wagner Act of 1935 prevented them from participating in most of the newly protected labor unions or collective bargaining practices (Duster, “The ‘Morphing’ Properties of Whiteness”).

Between 1934 and 1962, less than 2% of government-subsidized housing or loans went to non-white people (PBS, “Race: The Power of an Illusion”). Through the 1980s and 90s, black and Hispanic Americans were discriminated against in the housing market, as they were targeted with high-interest subprime loans, even if they would have qualified for fair-interest prime loans (Galster, “Racial Discrimination in Housing Markets during the 1980s”).

Is that enough evidence for you that institutional racist policies regarding housing were major sources of poverty for the black community? Are you truly surprised when crime is viewed as the last resort?

Even when black communities tried to go about their lives in a patriotic manner, such as serving their country, they were denied their army pensions, as was the case until 1906 (Wilson, “Racial discrimination in the union army disability pension system”).

The poor black communities in America are also subject to health concerns from environmental risk at a much higher proportion than their white counterparts. For instance, you have 1982 Warren County, NC, in which the local government proposed the dumping of polychlorinated biphenyl, a highly toxic chemical which can poison the entire local groundwater and drinking water supply where dumped, among many other cases (Skelton, “The Environmental Justice Movement”).

As far as crime is the issue, we can see from the results of Floyd v City of New York that blacks are disproportionately targeted by police to fill arrest quotas. The Southern Poverty Law Center found a 400% increase in racially motivated hate crime since 2008 (Arrigo “Encyclopedia of Criminal Justice Ethics”).

But sure, they’re responsible for all of their problems and injustices (and their ancestors’ problems and injustices) because they were born out of wedlock to a single mother.

Sincerely, a person born out of wedlock to a single mother.