Monthly Archives: March 2011

Michelle Alexander Comes to LACC

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An African-American child at a segregated drin...

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Michelle Alexander, the author of the New Jim Crow, will be coming to Los Angeles City College on March 23 at 12:30pm. Now her basic premise is that Blacks are incarcerated at a much higher rate than other ethnicities and that drugs are the main factor in their incarceration.  So instead of calling for young Black men to stop doing and selling drugs, instead of calling for better jobs and better educational opportunities we are just going to play the familiar victim card again and say “Wo is me, I am Black and I am locked up but it is not my fault. It’s the White man’s!”

 I am sick of the ongoing victimization by the Liberal Left. Even if that is the case, maybe if they would start following the law instead of breaking it, they wouldn’t spend so much time in jail. I live in the “hood” where there is a liquor store every other block and where the schools look more like mini prisons than they do centers for learning, however that doesn’t mean I have to fall into that “victim mindset.”

We have a Black president for crying out loud! (And yes, he is Black. We both have Black fathers and White mothers, so if I am Black so is he!) We are now “The Man.”  So enough with the ongoing racism! The day we voted for Obama based on his skin color instead of his qualifications is the day racism died!  Does that mean everyone in America is no longer racist-of course not! It does mean, however, that as a country institutionalized racism is no longer the norm!  You want to know what is ailing the Black community? Abortion! We are killing our own people at a pace that the federal government with all their Jim Crow laws never came close to achieving! In nearly 40 years, we have reached the level of lives lost that took 400 years of slavery to reach! So don’t tell me about what the White man is doing to us, what we are doing to ourselves is far worse! The most dangerous place for a Black person isn’t in the jails, it is in the womb! With 60% of Blacks being slaughtered on a daily basis, we need to be concerning ourselves with that real issue and not this manufactured one.

You want to know what elses is ailing the Black community? Education. More Black women go to college than Black men. Why is that? It is because Black men have bought into the whole “Thug Life” mentality and don’t want to better themselves.  There is good news, however, if you look at LACC’s ASO as a representation of what is happening throughout the colleges in America, you get a hopeful picture. There are 17 members on our board, out of those 4 are Black (3 males, 1 female), that is about a quarter of the student government is Black.  Considering we are not even a quarter of the U.S. population I say that is pretty good! If we can get a few more Mannys, Donovans and Ahmaads, we might just be okay.  In the meantime, we have to get Blacks interested in obtaining their education and get rid of the Oreo Complex that prevents them from doing so.

So my question to Michelle is this; Instead of trying to romanticize the Black criminal why don’t you do more to get at the roots of their incarceration? If you are going to school, working and taking care of yourself and family then you just don’t have the time to commit crimes and take drugs. It is time to stop making excuses for people who break the law and have them be held accountable for their actions. It is time the decent people spoke out!

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colorblindness, a conversation with Michelle Alexander (suppleradio.wordpress.com)