Black genocide in the United States

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In the United States, black genocide is a historiographical framework and rhetorical term used to analyze the past and present impact of systemic racism on African Americans by both the United States government and white Americans. 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.^[1][2][3]

While some critics claim black genocide is a conspiracy theory, its proponents argue it is a useful framework for analyzing systemic racism.^[3] Arguments against birth control, in particular, have been criticized as conspiratorial or exaggerated,^[4] although many contemporary commentators argue that black suspicions toward the state were "well founded" due to historic experiences of Black population control^[5][6] and programs such as the decades-long, government-sponsored compulsory sterilization of African Americans, as revealed in 1973.^[4]

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.^[7] During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers was criticized as contributing to black genocide.^[8] In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been cited in support of black genocide claims.^[9]