The MAGA Movement is justifying sending the military into urban centers because of the crime and violence, equating blackness with criminality. This is when you see the confusion of most people about the creation of the Black criminal.

I’m here to remind us that there is a vast body of scientific evidence that documents the intentional and varied ways that Europeans have successfully linked Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora to crime. This dangerous lie impacts not just perceptions of us by others, but how Black people look at our own worth.

The ideology is embedded in every cultural, social, economic and political decision made by the institutions and government committed to white rule. The continued domination of the white status quo required the acceptance and participation of not just white folks, but people of color — the victims themselves.

To keep enslaved and even freed Black people in their place, an interlocking web of practices, laws and policies was put in place to destabilize and halt any economic and political progress. When enslaved people were barely given enough food to eat, some took from the plentiful pantries of the enslavers. After all, their labor had created the necessities of life.

During colonial U.S. history, we see the escalation of forced criminality on Black people. Runaways were seen as dangerous and violent.

After the so-called abolishment of slavery, the Black Codes were introduced to keep Black folks tied to the land of their masters. Newly freed men and women were subject to convict leasing, where any menial infraction or trumped-up crime landed them in a parallel system of slavery. 

Social conditions created by racial capitalism criminalized being an orphan, being unemployed, being homeless, being vagrant and other situations that kept a ready supply of incarcerated people working off their alleged crimes through a penal system that benefited the white property owners. 

Fast forward to the country’s mass incarceration problem, the most vivid example of how this country looks at Black citizens. Black Americans are seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of serious crimes than white Americans.

When a Black defendant is sitting in front of a jury, he looks like a criminal, so he must be a criminal.

That’s how the media images and narratives have shaped the consciousness about the “other.”  Black people are not immune to these false stereotypes; they internalize the harmful beliefs about themselves and one another. When a young, Black male passes a woman on the street, it is not only white women who clutch their purses.

Black people must be vigilant when these racist stereotypes present themselves. We must be the first to educate and agitate against the dangerous perceptions. That’s because some of us think we can separate ourselves from the “thugs” and the “criminals.”

This negates understanding that the broad strokes of criminality brush over all of us, regardless of our station in life. Even the first Black president couldn’t escape the thug label. President Barack Obama was openly called a thug by the likes of Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh.

It was thugs who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The mainly white mob destroyed governmental property and assaulted federal employees.

The attorneys who prosecuted these crimes were ultimately purged from the Department of Justice. The head thug in the White House pardoned nearly all of those charged or convicted for the insurrection, even calling them patriots.

All of us, especially Black people, must understand that our fears may be real when it comes to crime. It is the source of that fear that has been manufactured and perpetrated that is not real.

Knowing this keeps us from being used against our own self-interests and propping up a racist system that benefits only a few. The starting point is knowing who gets to define the crime, who suffers from being labeled a criminal, and who benefits from criminalizing an entire racial group.