2008's Ten Worst Places to be Black [View All]

[Joanne98]

Corporate media, which conceal much about the state of things beyond our borders, work hard to obscure the facts of life for Americans too, including the state of Black America. In this year of symbolic firsts and "never befores" Black Agenda Report offers a useful index of how life is lived for hundreds of thousands of families in our communities.

America's prison system, the world's largest houses some 2.2 million people. Almost half its prisoners come from the one eighth of this country which is black. African American communities have been hard hit by the social, political and economic repercussions of the growth of America's prison state. Its presence and its reach into Black life is a useful index of the quality of life in Black America itself.

In this year of symbolic optimism, when a Black man is a leading contender in the presidential race, as well as being a leading recipient of contributions from Wall Street, from big insurance, and from military contractors, the need to measure and describe life as it is actually lived by millions of African Americans has never been greater. As we said in the introduction to 2005's Ten Worst Places to be Black
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