(New York: The New Press, 2010), p. 4.
No one can deny there is a huge problem with the rates of incarceration of African Americans. How often is a drug economy all to available to young black people that believe their reality lies in being hated and deprived of their birth right in the USA?
A young man of any race does not want to know his future is refused. Americans are promised there is a better future 'for the trying.' There is something profoundly wrong within our minority communities and it lies upon a path of economic reality with hopelessness and greed at its heart. Greed is taught in the USA. It is not taught in schools and religious meetings, but, it is taught in the commercialized world of the American consumer. It is benign to most adults able to achieve a Middle Class lifestyle, but, when a child's realtiy is one of a 'dead end,' no doubt their lives become that prophesy.
Michelle, at the very least, is trying to engage the conversation. She does this with murders still occuring and incarcerations of African Americans occurring in disproportion. I applaud her engagement of the problem. It needs to continue to resolve.
...If news reports (click title to entry - thank you) from the last three decades should check clean, Black and Brown males only number the Criminal Justice System today because they choose, of own free will, to turn the ways of crime and disorder; perhaps also because they seem to come from stock inherently deformed and defiled—unable to adapt to a civilized world where barbarism is unacceptable.
And if the renowned rants of Black butlers on the Right should be treasured, Black males only find their human rights violated constantly, only find their dignities criminalized, only fall in the crosshairs of this very real War on Drugs, because they’ve discarded phonetics, filled their iPods with N.W.A. records, altogether accepted academic success as a White Thing, and preferred to sag their khaki pants three inches below waist level....
