"FREE-ish?"

         It's the 21st century and one thing has not changed:African American Males are still the most feared being in this country. They have been and still are crying out this inscrutable phrase: "I can't breathe!" This is the life that they live day in and day out because of the systemic racism that our so beloved country has bestowed upon them.  I say bestow because if you are a black man in America, the law basically has the right to lock you up! The irony in this, the color of their skin should be an honor, but instead it has become their "Scarlet Letter"; therefore, automatically marking them as a criminal, a rapist or a troublemaker in the eyes of the law. So, even though slavery supposedly ended 400 years ago, it really hasn't.  It has just transformed and the powers that be are still getting wealthy by keeping their knee on the black man's neck.  Hence, the phrase: "I can't breathe!"

    In the Ted Talk Video, How We're Priming Some kids for College and Others for Prison, Alice Goffman shared her findings about the mass incarceration that has an appetite for gobbling up people of color and how the educational systems and policies are contributing to the cause.  To quote her, "Incarceration has grown 700% in the U.S." The proof of the vicious cycle that exists in urban communities was her story of Chuck, the 18 year old who got arrested and sent to an adult county jail for aggravated assault due to a fight in school where he pushed another student's face in the snow.  Are you serious??? Did his "alleged crime" fit the punishment? He spent the rest of his senior year incarcerated.  Then when he couldn't pay his court fees, the judge, "the overseer" issued a warrant for his arrest.  Even though Chuck attempted to return to school, he was too old and ended up back on the streets, running from the police and the court system to avoid incarceration (slavery). Where is the justice for Chuck? America needs a criminal justice system that prioritizes recovery rather than punishments. 

    In 1915, the movie, "Birth of A Nation" truly depicted how America saw the black man then and now: "The Negro male is an evil that has to be banished." More importantly, it revealed the truth of how race would play out in the U.S. Black men were considered cannibalistic, animalistic and a threat to the white woman while the Ku Klux were hailed as heroes. Can't help but to think of the current POTUS?  To me, his slogan make America Great Again, his spoken words, "I am The Law and Order Candidate" is synonymous with his other comment, "The Good Ole Days" code words for slavery, discrimination and/or inequality. For 400 years in this country, the goal has been to punish, punish, punish the Black man into submission just like with the whippings during slavery, the lynchings later on, the Jim Crow Laws during the Civil Rights Era and now, the New Jim Crow Laws:the prisons that are getting rich off of mass incarceration of Black and Brown males.  So, yeah, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution is a beast as the video 13 pointed out.  In America, once you commit a crime, you become a slave to the state. The rapper Common touched on this White Supremacy ideology in his lyrics for Freedom: "Slavery is still alive. Check Amendment 13. Instead of the word nigger, they use the word criminal. Black bodies being lost in the American Dream." C'mon now? It's 2020 why can't we ALL recognize that Black Lives Matter! Black men count for 6.5 % of the population and make up 40.2% of the prison population! One of the narrators in the film 13 stated, "Human beings are not born to be locked up and encaged." It can't get any simpler than that.

        Not only is the penal system contributing to the criminalization of black men but so is the educational system with all these federal, local and state policies that don't fix the problems in schools but exacerbate the racial disparities.  The authors of Law and Order in School and Society: How Discipline and Policing Policies Harm Students of Color, and What Can We Do About It, stated that policies like Zero Tolerance and The Gun-Free Zone have led to more students of color being suspended and expelled at outrageous rates in comparison to their white counterparts. Also, standardized testing and accountability policies have affected school curriculum and school quality.  WOW!!! How tricky are these policies? Even I, a black, female educator, have bought into them.  Sad... In Missouri as of January 2017, students caught fighting at school-regardless of their age- can be charged with a Class E felony and sent to a juvenile detention center.  Again, the same goal: to punish, to arrest and to incarcerate young black and brown males. So, yes, the U.S. public education has become a "silent partner" in the school-to prison pipeline.   There is no denying the fact that public education was established and developed within a sociopolitical context shaped by colonization and slavery. Alexander argues,"Mass incarceration, which traces to the end of slavery, is a continuation of the slave era, control over the lives of black people aimed at framing Black people as a permanent under-caste in American Life." This resonates with what Daarel Burnette II declared in his article, Devastated Budgets and Widening Inequities:How the Coronavirus Collapse Will Impact Schools, "Equity has always been a challenge for this country."

                To conclude, the authors sum up their CRT (Critical Race Theory) very nicely by insisting that as long as WE, society accepts that policing is necessary, then it follows that society must also accept that punishment is required and that Black and Brown bodies are disposable.