Black genocide in the United States

Black genocide in the United States
Part of Maafa
Paul Robeson signed the We Charge Genocide petition.
Location	United States
Date	1776-present[citation needed]
Target	African Americans
Attack type	slavery, apartheid, lynching, ethnic cleansing, forced sterilization, mass incarceration
Deaths	Almost 200,000 deaths due to institutional racism from 1945 through 1951[1][note 1] 4,400[3] killed in lynchings and other acts of racial violence (1877-1950), up to at least 10,000 unjust deaths from 1866 to 1951 according to We Charge Genocide[4]
Victims	597,000 Africans imported as slaves[5] — a slave from the age of 1 to 14 had twice the mortality rate of White Americans of the same age and Black slaves during the period had an average life expectancy of 21 to 22[6] 901 per 100,000 African Americans incarcerated[7]
Perpetrators	Federal government of the United States State governments of the United States Various White Americans
Motive	Racism/Negrophobia

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In the United States, black genocide is the argument that the systemic mistreatment of African Americans by both the United States government and white Americans, both in the past and the present, amounts to genocide. The decades of lynchings and long-term racial discrimination were first formally described as genocide by a now-defunct organization, the Civil Rights Congress, in a petition which it submitted to the United Nations in 1951. In the 1960s, Malcolm X accused the US government of engaging in human rights abuses, including genocide, against black people, citing long-term injustice, cruelty, and violence against blacks by whites.^[8][9]

While some critics claim black genocide is a conspiracy theory, its proponents argue it is a useful framework for analyzing systemic racism.^[2] Arguments against birth control, in particular, have been criticized as conspiratorial or exaggerated,^[10] although many contemporary commentators argue that black suspicions toward the state were "well founded" due to historic experiences of Black population control^[11][12] and programs such as the decades-long, government-sponsored compulsory sterilization of African Americans, as revealed in 1973.^[10]

Other events around this time have also been argued to amount to black genocide, such as the war on drugs, war on crime, and war on poverty, which had detrimental effects on the black community.^[13]

During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers was criticized as contributing to black genocide.^[14] In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been cited in support of black genocide claims.^[15]

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