PEACE 2 ALL AFRIKAN PEOPLE'S & DEATH 2 ALL ENEMIES of AFRIKA !!!
A Sister that I follow on twitter asked an interesting question last week. She asked what did people think was the cause of the rapid rise of HIV rates in Black women in the last few years. I responded that the mass incarceration of Black Males was at least a part of the cause & she agreed. That short conversation caused me to ponder, what other problems in our communities can be traced back to mass incarceration ? The list of problems got longer the more I thought about it.
Let's take the stat of 70% of Black children being born out of wedlock. With nearly half a million marriage age Black Men incarcerated surely their must be some correlation between these two events. It's fair to assume that at least 20% of these men have children. How many Black Women will marry a man in jail ? A few will, but the percentages are small. Either way, that leaves the children of these Black men in some form of single family home. In fact, some of these men undoubtedly ended up in jail trying to make money in the underground economy to provide 4 these very same children. This is not a new phenomenon, but has been going on since the crack boom of the 1980's.
Mass incarceration has become a multi-generational phenomenon. This has led to an alteration of Black communal culture. Homosexuality of both men & women has become more accepted especially among younger people. The question is how & why. Well, this too is partially an outgrowth of mass incarceration. Jail culture is rampant with homosexuality. Many of the men in jail do not consider themselves "gay" even though they engage in this type of behaviour. What was often overlooked was that many of these men continued this type of activity once they were let out of these institutions. This is the origin of the "downlow" phenomenon of the late 90's & early 2000's. Thousands of Black Men were engaging in homosexual acts while carrying on heterosexual relationships with their wives & girlfriends. Rarely did the wives & girlfriends of these men ever suspect their "Men" were in fact homosexuals.
Another unfortunate outgrowth of the exporting of jail culture into the Black community has been an increase of incidents of pedophilia. This is an unspoken truth. No 1 wants to speak on it in public but U hear about incidents more & more. Few people attribute this to mass incarceration, but let's think about it. A person spends 10 years in an environment where people are systematically raped & assaulted. They receive no counseling to address this issue when they are let out of prison. We know that most pedophiles were abused when they were children, but what about grown men who are raped ? What are the effects on their psyche ? If you will prey on grown men, what stops U from preying on little children ? This is something that definitely needs to be addressed in the Black community. I am not aware of any studies on this issue, so this is merely educated conjecture, however, we should protect our children at all costs. I would advise all single mothers who bring new men into their lives to shield their children until they get to know these men. Our children are too valuable to allow them to become prey to damaged individuals who are being unleashed in our communities.
Abibifahodie'
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