They Lied About Black Men for DECADES | Ricki Lake 1 in 3 Myth EXPOSED!

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]No one talks about the survival of the black race. In the 1990s, the black male was an endangered species. One out of every three black men are either in jail, on drugs, or gay.

[00:00:11]>> [snorts] >> Y'all hear that?

[00:00:16]Did y'all hear that?

[00:00:18]Where did that come from, guys? And y'all get mad for me saying this. Black men have a huge part in these false negative ass stereotypes that we're still dealing with till this day.

[00:00:32]>> [music] [music] [music] >> In the 1990s, the black male was an endangered species. One out of every three black men are either in jail, on drugs, or gay. Now, sisters are going to, you know, >> Look, they're shaking their head like, yes. Let's put a pin in this right now.

[00:00:58]Because I don't want anybody in the chat leaving here thinking that that dumb ass is true. It has never been true.

[00:01:05]These so-called pseudo intellectuals, the statistics, you didn't look at no statistics, brother. I do this for a living. And hell yeah, I'm pissed off at a 1994 uh clip. But that pissed me off.

[00:01:19]Because that gives black women free reign to move these things forward when they hear a black man perpetuate this foolishness. Let's start here.

[00:01:27]The claim, one in three black men are in jail, on drugs, or gay.

[00:01:32]This was a popular talking point in the 1990s, especially on talk shows like Ricky Lake, Sally Jessy Raphael, and others. Okay?

[00:01:43]But it was not based on any scientific data set.

[00:01:48]It is actually a combination of three different myths that got mixed together.

[00:01:54]All right, so A, a misinterpretation of incarceration statistics. The crack era, uh uh drug panic, and then early moral panic about LGBTQ visibility.

[00:02:09]Let's go here. The only statistic that got close to one in three came from a projection, not a reality. 1995 Bureau of Justice Statistics projection. One in three black boys born in the early 1990s could expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lifetimes if the rates did not change.

[00:02:31]That was not saying one in three black men at that moment were in prison. It was a speculative projection, and importantly, the prediction never came true. Now, how many times have you heard black people mention that one in three black men have a felony? One in three black men are in jail. This is where this dumb ass comes from. Okay? Because nobody was smart enough to do their due diligence and do the research to see that none of this has ever been true. Are y'all starting to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing?

[00:03:04]Why I'm dispelling all these false ass narratives that have been circulating in the sewers of the black community?

[00:03:11]Y'all get it? Incarceration rates in the mid-1990s, around 6 to 7% of black men aged 20 to 25, 25 to 29, were in state or federal prison. Adding jails brings us closer to 9 to 10 10%, depending on the year. 25 to 29. That is nowhere near 1/3. And again, that's from 25 to 20 29, and I just covered the crack epidemic, the crack era, where we had our largest incarceration rates. Okay? So even if you include the older black men during that time, the younger black men who weren't in prison, that 9 to 10% decreases to about 3 to 5%. Okay? When you add those groups that don't go to jail as much. All right?

[00:03:56]So for that study, it was 25 to 29 years old. All right? Let's continue.

[00:04:07]Let me bring this up.

[00:04:11]So, on drugs, highly misleading. In the 1990s, the war on drugs created the perception that black men were uniquely on drugs. But every major survey, including the National Survey on Drug Use and Drug and and Drug Use and Health, found that black and white Americans used drugs at similar rates. Jesus. Some years even showed slightly higher drug use among whites. So this part of the claim is also false.

[00:04:44]Dummy.

[00:04:47]Gay.

[00:04:48]Totally invented statistic. There has never been a data set showing one in three black men are gay, one in three black men gay plus incarcerated, uh plus on drugs. And then, from the UCLA Williams Institute Institute estimates, 3 to 5% black men identify as gay or bisexual. Nowhere near 33%.

[00:05:12]And that's even a projection because of the fact that um you know, we we extrapolate that out for men m- uh so real quick on how the health system works. Men who have self men who have sex with men, MSM, that is the umbrella for men black men who are men in general, whoever who identify as gay, bisexual, or whatever else, and also the quote-unquote down low black men. All of that is encompassed under the MSM population. So when we do tests and people come back positive for certain diseases, it gets filed under MSM.

[00:05:52]Because some black men don't identify themselves as being gay or bisexual.

[00:05:57]However, they had sex with a man. So that goes under the MSM category. Okay?

[00:06:03]That's why we adopted that, you know, that acronym or that, you know, that phrase because we do get all men all men coming into the clinics, and they'll say they had an encounter with a man, but they don't consider themselves gay or bisexual. So that's why we have MSM.

[00:06:21]Men who have sex with men. Make sense?

[00:06:25]All right. So yeah, so in the Williams Institute the study, the most recent one I did, may have slightly increased, but it was 1.2 million, and that is predominantly the 1.2 million LGBTQ black population. 61% is black women, 39% is black men. There's never been a time that there has been more black men that are gay than black women. Black women actually outnumber all all races of women's group in the gay department.

[00:06:54]Okay? It's It just is what it is.

[00:06:57]So and but black men get saddled with this, and it's always used as a, you know, in a negative connotation or whatever. Like I said, man, it's nothing People can be gay, whatever, do what they want. But when you use it in a negative, you know, you know, a negative disposition to try and shame black men, heterosexual black men, because a dude broke up with you or he talked he he he spoke his mind, and now he's sassy, that's where I step in. Where did the myth come from? This one in three line was a cultural talking point, not an empirical one.

[00:07:27]See here, it came from 1990s uh talk shows, like I said, housing project and crack era. Every third boy is either dead or locked up. Y'all know this was a local saying, not a data set. Misreading the BJS projections, people took a future hypothetical and treated it as a current fact.

[00:07:48]Early internet chain emails and books exaggerating statistics.

[00:07:53]Jesus. They were not based on CDC uh BGS NSDUH data.

[00:08:01]So again, let's go ahead and clarify.

[00:08:04]All this stuff not true at all. There is no version of legitimate math that reaches 33%. The one in three black men have a felony statistic does not mean one in three black men walking around today have a felony. That is a racist talking point. The Sentencing Project report, like I reported, shows black men born in 2001 now have a one in five lifetime risk, and not a one in three.

[00:08:32]And that was one of the sticking points where I was telling you guys that you need to be proud of these millennials and the Gen Z'ers, because they are primarily responsible for decreasing these rates.

[00:08:46]Okay? The one in three black men are felons line is outdated, inaccurate, and is often used as a racist talking point to exaggerate criminality in the black community. And just to see a black man from the 1990s perpetuating this narrative, you can see why black women think they're less than. And I've said this before, I don't blame black women for thinking that.

[00:09:08]How many times have we seen on these shows black men repeating these false narratives? Black women repeating these false narratives. And then, the modern black women hear it and they're like, oh, well, these men ain't Now, I I ain't got no reason but to try and date outside of my race because all these black men is broke, they in jail, or they gay.

[00:09:28]And that's leading black women down a dark path because there has been a slight increase on black women getting with white men white men, and they end up deleted.

[00:09:39]Because they think that black men are less than, probably, which is why they have these tweets and about black men being trash, and then they go to white men. He ain't ready to have handle that black woman pressure.

[00:09:50]And they end up getting deleted. It's not right at all. It's sad, but I feel that if they were I think if they were told the truth and the narrative about black men was more positive and more truthful then they wouldn't think like that. But since it's not, they're going to these other races of men because they think that we're less than because we have people in the black community and society telling them that we ain't And that's why we need to be more vocal as black men to hey man, this is this is wrong. This is false. This is not true.

[00:10:24]Okay? Some of these women let them go. It ain't no saving them. I tried.

[00:10:30]I was trying to be more vocal in the comment section. They ain't listening.

[00:10:33]It's just a bunch of shaming language after I tell them the truth.

[00:10:36]But some of these young women, you know, hey man, we got to start being more vocal. Okay?

[00:10:43]>> [music] [music] [music] [music]