better conditions and the possibility of being released and allowed to live as a free man. this deceptively simple plan is still being used today.
our society has become anesthetized to the systematic racism that is built into our laws, legal proceedings and the social repercussion this has. there are approximately 1 million black men in prison. this means 1 in 3 black men will go to prison. In the united states, in 2015, police on black civilian death toll was at 306, 14 times the number of soldiers who died in the same year during operation enduring freedom.
the argument that racism is a thing of the past is obviously ignorant, but i feel like the manifestation of racism is different. we have people of color in places of authority and privilege. “we have a black president, charlotte has a black chief of police, there were black police officers...how can you say this is a racial issue?” well, easy: the laws themselves are meant to disenfranchise through intimidation and incarceration. the war on drugs has effectively turned the black man into the criminal. to be black in the united states is to be guilty of everything until searched, probed, degraded, occupied and molested. as a white person i am quite unaware of what it feels like to prepare my children for encounters with the police. i have never had a police officer pull a gun even when the situation was violent. i have never been accused of having drugs on my person, much less be subjected to a cavity search. To ignore the fact that this is not the life my black peers have is tantamount to consent.
we are not just dealing with race injustices.
corporations are being allowed to destroy our planet at a rate never seen before. i remember being a kid and hearing about oil spills that happened in the ocean, far away from the texas town i lived in. it seemed shocking and appalling, scary even, to the adults in my life who were discussing it. now we have companies willfully and knowingly dumping toxins into the ground and water supplies. a friend of mine who is a petero-engineer told me that some states will not allow for the chemical wastes from fracking to be disposed of, but there are states where these companies have contracted to dump the waste there meaning that the waste is transported, through pipelines to the designated dump space. we have no way of counteracting the toxic effects these chemicals have on our water supply, our agriculture, the people. there have been accounts of towns flooded with toxins due to a pipeline breaking, towns where the methane gas coming through the plumbing was so concentrated the water was on fire and earthquakes where there have not been earthquakes before. climate change is apparent, and we have no way of setting things right.