The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

According to the state, our sons are criminals. Our daughters are not mentioned, but our sons are being made criminals because we give them everything they want and we do not supervise them.

This may be in part true, but there is an entire other side to this is that more troubling. However, we go along with this and it becomes a part of the way our state and society relate. Sadly, we also allow the state to run us, instead of us running the state.

The state is currently controlled by a small group of people who have decided, as has been pointed out in numerous of these columns, that young boys are destabalising the country with their violence and their anger.

Yet those same folks choose to take no responsibility for any wrong they do or any poor impressions they provide. This challenge today though is about the way we have become victims to state violence and the power of their language and creation or depiction of life that is partly true, but not fully. The state sells and markets that partial truth as if it were the whole story.

Our sons are criminals: this statement allows the state to deploy all its strength and arms against these young men. They do not need rights because they are bad, they are exceptions to anyone’s need for rights. This allows them to be shot on the streets and to be beaten up in police custody because they are criminals.

The state has chosen to use the same language as many white countries and argue that all young, black men, especially if they are poor, are expendable and they are criminal. They cannot be trusted. Our daughters are somehow outside of this.

Sexism

This language is highly sexist. The painting of all young black men as criminals states that only men are criminals. It singles them out for different treatment because they, according to the story the police and government create, are bad and a threat to us. Only our sons are criminals.

Sexism is the creating of a system that makes one group less than another and justifies its discrimination against them by underscoring their inferiority. It makes them unable to move up in society and creates a multi-tiered system where they are close to the bottom. We are used to talking about sexism against women, but assume that there is no sexism against men. It is an extremely sexist statement to create a national service announcement that tells us how to stop making criminals of our sons. The community sees this as a truth and that daughters cannot be criminals, though they are just as capable as criminal thought as are boys.

Given the way we create a system that discriminates against young black males beginning with the way we bring them up, then we make it almost impossible for them to access a good education. Girls usually do better at school because of education’s structure and the ability to sit still, listen and absorb, though in this country we are failing on all fronts.

Boys are discriminated against once they are dark-skinned, poor, and/or living in an imagined ghetto. We determine how far they can go based on where they live. We also discriminate against them because we send them to poorly supplied and often poorly equipped schools.

Girls are smart, better educated and non-violent. Yet we see countless videos on YouTube where it is young women stealing from stores, committing violence on young men, often boyfriends, yet they are not criminals. They steal, lie and commit murder, but are free from being painted as criminals. Sexism also means that we assume girls are less able to commit crimes and we argue that they are weak and lesser beings.

Racism

When we argue that our sons are criminals, though in a black country, the same mechanisms are used as in Anglo-European countries. In 2010, after the riots in Britain, a similar trend came up. But the community announcement on television that purports that we are making our sons into criminals by giving them everything and not our daughters is the same language of black inferiority and criminality. During colonial days, laws and policies were used to control movement of blacks based on their inferiority, racially entrenched ideas of black male criminality is real. The current racist backlash in the United States against young black males is a part of this tradition as shows how the system, even when headed by a president who happens to be black, can remain as anti-young Negroes as it ever was. It is structural and the violence visited on them by police cultural. They provide the exception that allows exceptional violence to be deployed to protect the state from them.

By justifying this language with images of black criminality and hoodlum behaviour, the stakes are in place and the state operates a violent project to eradicate black threat and violence. They cannot be trusted and so must be shot even when on the ground, pinned down by two officers of the law with a knee in the back. They possess superhuman evil strength and so can throw off such power and free themselves. They must therefore be killed, and the killing is justified and/or normalised. The need to create exceptional responses and the structural creation of the same speaks to a culture of racially charged and informed images of blackness.

Violence

Whereas blacks are inferior and violent, they must be controlled by state-sanctioned violence. These policies have been historically recognised. Runaway slaves could be whipped to death because they threatened the structure of slavery. Young, black men could be lynched because they sought to step beyond the line of their neighbourhood, defined as a ghetto, the wrong side of the tracks. People often say that blacks are animalistic and bring violence out all the time because they are unable to reason beyond that. The less educated one is the one who more easily relies on violence to win battles and conflicts. Violence is an interesting conundrum as the more we argue that young black men are violent, the more we believe it, and the more violent they become. The more the culture of violence consumes them and the more we justify the use of violence to control them; this is an exception though. Exceptions soon become law and the law creates a counter culture.

Young men are dangerous and criminal, according to the community announcement on cable TV, yet there is no awareness of how we create them or how racially charged and sexist this image of black male criminality is, even if it is a black country.

• bethellbennett@gmail.com