Last April, The New York Times reported that there were 1.5 million African-American men “missing” due to early deaths or incarceration. Or, as NYT summarized it: “More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.”
These are men who should be alive and accounted for, but who have instead been vanished due to multiple strains of racism enshrined in the nation’s health and criminal justice systems. The impacts of their erasure are felt not only in families and communities, but also in the workforce, schools, and the electorate.
The consequences of their absence from that last realm, that of the voting public, has further disenfranchised an alreadyover-disenfranchised black population. This is the finding of a new study from the Dartmouth sociologists David Cottrell and Michael C. Herron, along with the University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith and Javier M. Rodriguez, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. In their paper, “Mortality, Incarceration, and African-American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States,” the researchers say that, when considering democratic participation, the effect of thisdisappearance of African Americans is actually worse than what the NYT reports.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...an-americans/496067/]
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