Study: La. Black men are vanishing
27th April 2015 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
A study released on April 20 by The New York Times’ Upshot column noted, “For every 100 Black women not in jail, there are only 83 Black men. The remaining men – 1.5 million of them – are, in a sense, missing.”
Disproportionate mortality rates, or drastically higher levels of incarceration, due to disproportionate rates of imprisoned African Americans, have not only skewed population stats, leaving fatherless households, but may also be the reason for the political weakness of Democratic candidates in the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. These are the same states with the highest levels of Black incarceration.
Left without note in all of the stories is that Louisiana ranks amongst the highest in the nation for the gap of African-American men to women in almost all of its 64 parishes. (In most of the other states, the gap is concentrated in urban areas. In Louisiana, it spreads across almost every corner of the state.)
In most of the Pelican State, in a belt that runs from Southeastern to Northwestern Louisiana, Black men, as a percent of all Black adults—not in prison or militarily deployed—amount to only 43 percent to 46 percent of the overall African-American population.
Southwestern Louisiana ranks slightly better, but still anemic, at 49 percent and 52 percent respectively.
That means in most Louisiana parishes, there is barely one Black man available for every two Black women, with all of the affects on family and community that implies.
To contrast this, according to the study, nationwide, there are 99 white men to every 100 white women, with the numbers in Louisiana not far out of the U.S. average.
As authors Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy note nationally, “Of the 1.5 million missing Black men from 25 to 54 — which demographers call the prime-age years — higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000. Almost one in 12 Black men in this age group are behind bars, compared with one in 60 non-Black men in the age group, 1 in 200 Black women and one in 500 non-Black women.”
“Higher mortality is the other main cause. About 900,000 fewer prime-age Black men than women live in the United States, according to the census. It’s impossible to know precisely how much of the difference is the result of mortality, but it appears to account for a big part. Homicide, the leading cause of death for young African-American men, plays a large role, and they also die from heart disease, respiratory disease and accidents more often than other demographic groups, including Black women.”
Yet David Nir and Jeff Singer of the leftwing blog DailyKos observe that the disparity has a distinct political effect. “
While the [NYT] article doesn’t delve into political implications, they aren’t difficult to figure out: a sizable piece of the Democratic Party’s most reliable population segment (the Democratic vote share among African Americans often exceeds 90 percent) is left unable to vote.”
“And since many of them are in states that disenfranchise felons [such as Louisiana], they’re still unable to vote even when they’re no longer ‘missing’ and returned to public life. Felon disenfranchisement often gets overlooked by focused on voter ID requirements and registration list purges, but, in terms of raw numbers of people affected, ending felon disenfranchisement would likely make the single biggest difference.”
Researcher David Jarman has uncovered that the single greatest correlation, at the parish level, between demographic data and Democratic vote percentage, isn’t based on race, income, or education, but rather on the percentage of women over age 25 who’ve never married.
Louisiana, not surprisingly, has one of the highest percentages amongst the 50 states, due to the rural, mostly Black counties along the Mississippi River many of the Black men are “missing.”
Some attribute that to our high level of military participation, but that might not be the case.
Nir and Singer went on to add, “An initial worry on reading the article was that their decision to focus only on the Census category of ‘households’ and not people living in ‘group quarters’ was leading them to assign a lot of Black men living in dormitories and, especially, military barracks to the ranks of the ‘missing.’ However, as they explain on their methodology page, that’s not the case. For one thing, their sample is limited to men 25-54, which would probably rule out most college undergraduates and recent military enlistees.”
“Also, the military isn’t so disproportionately African-American (around 18 percent overall for active duty) that it would skew the larger numbers much.
In fact, if you dig deeper into Census information on “group quarters,” only a small percentage of the military live in barracks at all these days: 339,000 out of 1.4 million active duty, with another approximately 400,000 stationed outside of the country and thus not counted by the Census (per 2011, which is probably lower now). Contrast that with 2.3 million persons in prison, 3.7 million in ‘other’ (mostly dorms), and 1.5 million in, surprisingly, nursing homes.”
“However, if you factor in the racial breakdowns of the people in group quarters according to the Census, you get the real sickening scale of the impact of incarceration on African Americans. Only 47,000 Blacks (most of whom fall in the 18-24 range anyway) are in military barracks, but 858,000 are incarcerated. (There are also 195,000 in nursing homes, though, given the gender disparity in longevity, probably not too many of them are male.)”
The NYT’s Justin Wolfers studied the correlation of Southern states where the overall percentages of Blacks and overall incarceration rates are both high. He found that in all cities with more than 10,000 black residents, the worst ratio is one that’s been in the news a lot lately: Ferguson, Missouri.
The locales where the ratio reverses itself — where more Black men reside than Black women — tend to coincide with the states containing the lowest Black percentages overall, states like Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, and the Dakotas. Wolfers attributes that to African-American men going there to work (i.e. extraction industries, he suggests, in Alaska and North Dakota), and to areas where military deployments do provide a higher percentage of African-American males.
This article originally published in the April 27, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
