Black genocide in the United States

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.

The black genocide analogy has historically been applied to the war on drugs, war on crime, and war on poverty for their detrimental effects on the black community. During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers was criticized as an expression of black genocide. In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been described as black genocide.

Critics of the black genocide framework describe it as a conspiracy theory, while its proponents argue it is a useful framework for analyzing systemic racism. Arguments against birth control, in particular, have been criticized as conspiratorial or exaggerated, although attempts at black population control and government-sponsored compulsory sterilization did occur as recently as the 20th century.