I wanted to start today's blog by posting a great clip on the English Language from I love Lucy
This week’s reading focused on teaching English as a
second language. As a bilingual person and someone who had to learn English in
Kindergarten, I was struck by both articles. I started by reading “Teaching
Multicultural Children by Virginia Collier. I have often imagined how hard it
would be to teach English as a second language to children. Collier states that
“teachers must be creative and flexible, serve as a catalyst for discovery as
students learn to operate effectively in their multiple worlds, be able to
meditate and resolve intercultural conflicts, keep students on task and serve
as a support base.
The article uses guidelines to teach students who are learning
English as a second language.
1.Be
aware that children use first language acquisition strategies for learning
English as a second language. This
guideline focuses on the belief that students use the same strategies in
learning a language that they used when learning their first language. They
strategically identify patterns in the language, they find ways of identifying
the nuances in the language and “they take risks to try to use the analogies of
the first language”
2.Do
not consider yourself as a remedial teacher expected to correct so—called
deficiencies of your students. (this guideline I really had a tough time
understanding) it states that “the difficulty with teaching languages to native
speakers is that teachers have been trained to teach them as foreign languages.
I really need help understanding this and hope we discuss this guideline in
class.
3.Don’t
teach a second language in any way that challenges or seeks to eliminate the
first language. This rule really resonated with me as I
feel that it is the most important rule. We must teach students to not forget
about their first language or that their first language is wrong. We must
recognize their bi-dialectism. “to affirm their home language means that they
will not be told that they are wrong or that what they say is vulgar or wrong”.
I wonder what Delpit would say about the past statement. I feel that she would
give Ms Colier a high five and they would be best friends.
4.Teach
the standard form of English and students’ home language together with an
appreciation of dialect differences to create an environment of language
recognition in the classroom. And then Delpit would
abruptly end their friendship after Ms Colier brings up this guideline. This
guideline advocates that teachers who teach English should use the student’s
dialect in their classes in order to enrichen the classroom and make the
students feel that they are represented. “So when children come to their
classrooms with their non-standard varieties of English and home language,
teachers must look at the benefits of having multiple ways of talking in the
classroom.” Delpit would disagree, I feel, because of she would want the
students to explicitly learn the language of the culture of power.
5.Do
not forbid young students from code switching in the classroom.Understand the function that code switching
serves.
This weeks reading focused on creating a safe and conducive learning environment for LGBT youth. Safe Spaces: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming for LGBT youth brought up many things that I have not thought about when it comes to the challenges that LGBT youth face in the classroom and in their environments. In order to understand the challenges I thought it was pertinent to find facts about LGBT youth in America. I have attached
them on the margins of this blog post.
The info-graphics just represent what is very clear about american culture, America has a hetero-sexist problem. I believe that most of our education on acceptance of others comes from human interaction. As unfortunate as it is people tend to only care about something until it becomes personal. We can read about the marginalized communities, discuss their plights and even sympathize for their struggles but for a lot of people until they know someone in that marginalized community and have interacted with that person, broken bread with them learned with them that is when a deeper level of understanding occurs. Our education system is at a crossroads in educating students about LGBT issues, and although it seems as though things are getting better, The suicide rate and homelessness rates for LGBT youth are too high. This brings me back to
this week's reading. The authors argue that "children encounter cultural and ethnic norms different from those of their family. If our homes are incubators, keeping our children safe as they grow into patterns of family life, schools are outcubators places that introduce new ways of thinking and behaving". With this statement the author begin to introduce the biggest problem plaguing the LGBT youth in America. The place were students learn things different than the way
that they are brought up is failing to introduce the LGBT community and thus creating an othering of their community. The "word curriculum derives from a word in Latin that means "to run a race" the authors argue that in a race there are winners and losers and that "We contend that the winners are those who see themselves in textbooks, art, films, and other educational materials. Youth who see themselves as wise or powerful main characters or heroes
worthy of celebration and emulation will feel validated included and safe inside their classrooms." If students that represent them are not represented in their curriculum than there is an alienation and a lack of ownership in their education. I have felt like that before with no authors of colors in my English classes in high school, however, ( and this is where my heterosexual privilege lies) if a teacher were to advocate for her class to read more students of color, there would be very little red tape to climb as opposed to reading about characters of different sexual orientation/ gender identity.
Monday, March 21, 2016
Literacy are today's youth digital natives?
Are today's youth Digital Natives
by Boyd discusses how students are digital natives to an evolving technological
world. In the beginning of the article one can already see what the main
argument of the chapter is, "the children who attend school today are
digital natives who think nothing of learning through the use of
technology" The author argues that although teens are active participants
and social media students do not have the knowledge to make the most out of
their online experiences and that the rhetoric of digital natives is
"often a distraction to understanding the challenges that youth face in a
networked world.
Boyd believes that although
students can share or create content online it does not mean that they have the
knowledge to properly consume information, and that educators are lacking in
teaching students the skills to engage with contemporary technology effectively
and meaningfully.
The roots of the derives from a
Marc Prensky article titled Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants where Prensky he states today's students
think and process information fundamentally different from their predecessors.
He states that they should be called digital natives because they are native
speakers of the digital language of contemporary technology, they have not
lived in a world where the internet and computers do not exist. Digital
immigrants are people who "were not born into the digital world but have,
at some later point in our lives become fascinated by and adopted many facets
of technology". Boyd believes that the term digital native obscures the
uneven distribution of technological skills and media literacy across youth
populations "presenting an inaccurate portrait of young people as
uniformly prepared for the digital era and ignoring the assumed level of
privilege required to be native. Boyd believes that educators purport the
inequity in technological education in this country, because those who are
privileged tend to learn technological skills outside of the classroom. We must
not assume that all students have innate media literacy; in a world that
required media literacy to get well-paying jobs, access to health care
educators must do their part to cultivate media and technological literacy.
The article also discusses that
educators do not really teach students how to validate online sources, and
educators typically judge by the brand of the source. For example, a lot of
educators tell students to not use Wikipedia for their sources, and instead
have them use Google or Encyclopedia Britannica without letting them know what
it is that makes one source greater than the other. The author also
interestingly states that research has stated that encyclopedia Britannica is a
less reliable source than Wikipedia. The way that teachers teach students to
use google for their research also creates a problem when students
automatically assume everything found on google is fact. Students are not
learning to question their media, and it is because of the educators not
catching up with the way that technology and media is consumed.
Below is the Ted Talk that this article focuses on in their critique of the term I figured it could be useful
"The systems broken
the schools closed the prisons open, I aint got nothing to lose mafucka we rolling."
With
the first line in the first verse of his chart topping single "Power"
Kanye west hides the harsh realities of the school to prison to pipeline, a
phenomenon that affects low income students of color all over the country. With
that one line Kanye draws a comparison against two opposite institutions,
institutions that we as a society want to believe that have no correlation. We
want to believe that the schools are open and that the prisons are closed but
that simply is not the way that it is, hence why the system is broken. The
schools are segregated and the prisons are open, this line is alluding to the
segregation of both institutions. The school system is segregated because the culture
of power has access to the best educational opportunities and they close it to
students of color. In contrast the prisons are open to students of color as the
population of the prison system is predominantly African American and Hispanic.
This week I really wanted to learn more about the school to prison pipeline
that Kanye West is alluding to in his song Power.
On
rethinkingschools.org I chose to read Arresting Development. Zero Tolerance and The Criminalization of Children by Annette Fuentes, and a short article titled,School to Prison Pipeline in Mississippi. The Arresting Development article
focuses on the school to prison pipeline and zero tolerance policies. The term
Zero tolerance traces its roots to the Reagan presidency and the war on drugs in
the 1980’s, “Congress enacted the Drug Free Schools and Communities act in 1986
bringing the war on drugs to school”. During the Clinton administration zero
tolerance was taken further with the 1994 Safe and Gun-Free Schools Act, that
made bringing a gun to school warrant a one-year expulsion for students and
also provided federal funding for anti-violence programs directed at youth.
These policies were viewed as a way to sway the prediction that was made by
criminologists like James Q Wilson and John Dilulio that viewed African American
and Latino males as “super predators” that would incite a new wave of violence
in the late 90’s. The 1999 shooting at Columbine High School spearheaded the
national move for police in our schools, and while Columbine was a
predominantly white high school most schools that implemented having police in
the schools were schools that had a high population of Blacks and Hispanics. The
schools that were mostly segregated began to become a pipeline for youths of
color to end up in prison.
Although Zero Tolerance in
schools began, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that
incidents of gun violence have been dropping steadily since 1993. Zero
tolerance one focused on guns, alcohol and guns now targets an ever expanding
range of behaviors. It is estimated that from 1997-2007 police officer presence
in high schools increased by a third. Zero tolerance combined with the
increasing police presence in our nation’s high schools are taking away the
disciplining of students from a school to issue to a law enforcement issue. According to Judith Browne Dianis, co-director
of the Advancement Project a civil rights and advocacy group, “Things a police
officer might not arrest someone in a bar fight for, your seeing them make
arrests in schools for. There are a lot
of children arrested for disorderly conduct, which has a very subjective
definition. Whoever is standing there gets to define it.” Schools with officers
are 5 times more likely for a student to be arrested for disorderly conduct.
Disorderly conduct is an offense that is most often left to the interpretation of
the school system and that in my opinion should not be a reason to arrest a
student instead it should be a time for the school to discipline a student and
not to criminalize a student.
Zero tolerance by the numbers.
In 2009-2010 school year California recorded
757,000 suspensions it was only second to Texas that had 1.67 million
suspensions and the population of texas schools is only 4.7 million students.
According to the ACLU there are more African Americans
in the US justice system than there were slaves in the 1850’s.
40 percent of students expelled in the US are
Black
70 percent of students arrested in school are
Black and Latino
Currently African Americans and Hispanics youth
make up 3/5ths of the juvenile delinquent prison population.
Regan’s war on drugs was primarily waged in
communities of color. Although people of color are no more likely to sell drugs
as their white counterparts, Blacks and Hispanics historically have higher
rates of arrests.
African Americans comprise 14 percent of
regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.
From 1980-2007 about one in three of 25.4
million adults arrested for drugs was Black
Zero
tolerance often targets students in populations of color. Schools that are
segregated are more likely to have a police presence at their high schools.
According to Russel Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana
University, Skiba suggests that when teachers are inexperienced and come from
different racial and class backgrounds they teach “cultural discontinuities”
and they create adversarial dynamics in the class room. An alienating
curriculum poor classroom management skills and negative stereotypes of black
youth can lead to authoritarian disciplining and overreliance on suspensions. Hence what we talk about in the Finn article
and the segregation of schools. Below you can find a great video explaining the school to prison pipeline.
This brings me to the short article on Meridian Mississippi, a town who
was sued by the Department of Justice in 2012. Meridian is a perfect example of
how the prison to pipeline works in some of our school systems. The lawsuit
alleged that the city’s juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison
pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice
system violating young people’s due process rights along the way”.
In Meridian when schools wanted to discipline students they called the
police instead arresting students as young as 10 years old, in most times the
officers didn’t even know if the offense was worthy of an arrest. The complaint
read that the students were incarcerated without for days without a hearing or
even knowing why they were arrested. The
department of justice lawsuit came after years of research by organization like
the Southern Poverty Law Center, (SPLC) that determined that 67 percent of
youth in detention centers in Mississippi arrived from the Meridian school
system. In between school and detention-schools, students were denied access to
lawyers and due process, “the administrators were the judge and executioner”.
The managing attorney of the SPLC states, that although Meridian is a city
comprised of 61 percent African American over a five-year period, “there was
never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that
kids of color were suspended for”.
NOT ONE!
One middle school student was suspended over 30 times for offense
including wearing the wrong colored socks and being late to class. The
Department of justice in its lawsuit said “that the city police department served
as a “de-facto taxi service” shuttling students away from school and into youth
jails.
Lastly I will leave this hip-hop-centric blog post with a very brief
analysis of another Kanye West song, titled new slaves. The song is a song dedicated
on talking about the Prison Industrial complex and the privatizations of our
prisons. Prisons owend by private corporation and not by the judicial system.
The biggest private prison system corporation is the CCA. The way that they
work is that they receive tax payer dollars for ever inmate in their prisons.
In Kanye West song New Slaves, he states
I
know that we the new slaves... Meanwhile the DEA, teamed up with the CCA They tryina lock n---s up, they tryna make new
slaves See that's the privately owned prison, get your
piece today They prolly all in the Hamptons, braggin 'bout
what they made
With this
verse Kanye is referring to the war on drugs. The DEA being the Drug
Enforcement Agency and the CCA being the largest private prison corporation in
the world, and the profits that exist with having a private prison be filled
with prisoners. This song expresses a sentiment about the distrust of minorities
and the judicial system, and the Reagan era war on drugs that sent majority African
Americans and Hispanics to prison at alarming rates. He compares the prison
system to slavery because it seems that it is mostly the people with slave
ancestry who are getting arrested and who are being profited from in the prison
industrial complex. This is why I feel that the, The system is broken,
This week’s
reading really affected me and made me really want to either get into the class
room or find a way of changing educational policies in this country. It made
me think very deeply about social class and how the language and the approaches
to education are really meant to keep the status quo in check. The author
relied heavily on the influences of Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo
Freire. Paulo Freire in the 1960 started an adult literacy program for Brazil’s
illiterate poor. Freire believed that the way that literacy was being taught to
this group of people needed to be approached differently.
“Before he
started teaching reading and writing he asked his students to reflect on the
concepts of justice… He asked his students what he might do to secure justice
and suggested that literacy would make them far better able to engage in the
struggle they would certainly face if they tried to get a better deal.”
Freire’s
intentions were to teach literacy with the intention of education a social
class to be able to fight for their rights in an unbalanced Brazil. His
teaching eventually led him to be exiled from Brazil, as those formerly illiterate
students began to get registered to vote. Freire “understood that for the poor
in the slums of Recife literacy as part of the identity of the “other”—a hated
other in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor is ever so much
more obvious than it is in the United States” Paulo Freire made me think about
the Martha Demienteff quote in the Lisa Delpit reading.
We listen to the way people talk not
to judge them, but to tell what part of the river they come from. These other
people are not like that. They think everybody needs to talk like them. Unlike
us they have hard time hearing what people say if they don’t talk exactly like
them. Their way of talking and writing is called formal English.
In a way, Demienteff
is teaching a Freirean idea, with that quote she is underlying a dislike for
those who speak formal English, but she is also hinting that in order to
succeed they need to be able to become literate in that world. You can almost
feel her expressing and understanding the disdain for the Alaskan native people
of the culture of power, but she is teaching them so that one day they can
affect change in their communities. The literacy that Freire is talking about
is also teaching historical and cultural context which is important in any
classroom for economically oppressed students.
My favorite
passage and the most emotional passage for me in this week’s reading comes from the
author describing one of Freire’s thoughts on the poor, “They are so submerged
in their daily lives that they have little or no awareness of the possibility for
change, much less what they might do to bring about change. They view their
conditions as natural, the will of God, or determined by fate” this passage
speaks to me on so many levels, and I feel it speaks greatly of our socio-economic system in the US. Our working poor in this country work so hard and
are economically running in circles and if they were to stop and think they
would notice that it isn’t something natural, or the will of god it is a cause
of a system in place by those who want to keep power in their hands. It made me
think about my father a lot and the story that I tell to students in the inner
city when talking about the word opportunity.
Rhode Island
college is nicknamed the college of opportunity and I ask the students to give
me a synonym for the word opportunity. usually a student responds with the word
“chance” It is then that I ask the students the question
Why college?
Students usually respond with various answers, “to
have a better future” or “to make money” or “to have a job that I like”
I then ask
them, If I were to ask you parents
Why do they want you, their children, to go
to college what would they say?
I let them respond until I get one of the
students to answer “so that I could have a better life than they had.”
I then
proceed to tell them about my father and the story goes like this.
"My father
was the smartest man I had ever met. When I lived in Dominican Republic he used
to read my history text books from front to back within the day and then
recited most of the important parts in history to me and help me with my
homework. My father had a high school diploma but never had the opportunity to
go to college.
After we
immigrated to the US, my father took a job at a local supermarket. I never knew
what he did for work just that he worked at C-town supermarket. One day my
father’s car broke down and I had to pick him up at work. It was winter and the
temperature was in single digits. I
arrived to pick him up that day 20 minutes early and when I looked around the
parking lot I realized what my father did for a living. My father was the
person at the supermarket who retrieved the carriages and I remember looking at
him and seeing how the bitter weather conditions had made his skin dry and
ashy. Not that there is anything wrong with pushing carriages as it is honest
work, but I am talking about the smartest person that I had ever met. I remember looking at him and understanding
something that I was too young to be able to verbalize.
I then
proceed to ask the students why do you think the smartest person that I had
ever met was pushing carriages for a living?. There is always the one student
who says something to the extent of “because he didn’t get an education” My
goal is to get those students to think of their own experiences and to think
about their working class parents. From experience from working in the
community I can tell you that most working class families I come in contact
with know that education is the way out of their struggle as working class
families, but now we just need to make that education a much more
transformational one.
This American Life’s
episode 562 discusses the topic of failing schools in largely Black and
Hispanic communities. The journalist in this interview, Nikole Hanna Jones has
been trying to find solutions to the lack of improvement in schools with large
under-represented, minority populations. She states
“And I would go to schools.
And they would just always be trying these new things that actually sounded
like they might work. They would do things like “well put a great magnet
program here. Or we are going to focus on literacy…. They are always talking,
really, about the same things. I mean you could take the conversations and go
from district to district to district, and you will always hear the same
things”
The producer of the show Ira Glass then comments “what she noticed was
that it never worked. I mean, like never” They begin to set for discussing why schools in underrepresented neighborhoods seem to always fail,
and that the achievement gap between white students and black students was so
disproportionate. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) the achievement gap occurs when one
group of students (such as, students grouped by race/ethnicity, gender)
outperforms another group and the difference in average scores for the two
groups is statistically significant (that is, larger than the margin of
error). As of 2011 the NAEP which is a government funded testing
organization that tests students in the nation to measure academic achievement
in schools determined that in many
ways the achievement gap was still existent. In their report "School Composition and the Black-White Achievement gap they determine white 8th graders
tested on average 31 points higher than Black 8th graders in the US.This analysis gave reasons as to why it could be that
Black students are testing lower than their white counterparts. All of the
issues in this government funded study has reiterated the issues that Nikole
Hanna Jones argued in her reporting. The theories on why the achievement gap
exists can be found in the image below.
Segregation in schools
YES Schools are still segregated
In the report by Nikole
Hanna-Jones the term “segregation of schools” is used very deliberately. It is
mainstream knowledge that Brown vs Board of education made it unlawful for
schools to be segregated. Schools by law can no longer be segregated. However what
this report introduces is the new type of segregation that occurs in not so
blatant ways as the days before Brown VS Board of education. Policies in
American government, gentrification and “The Great White Flight” have all
contributed to the re-segregation of schools in America. In a report done by
PBS titled the return of school segregation in eight charts, the article gives
some shocking statistics on the re-segregation of schools. It goes on to state
that Since 1988 the rate of Black students at predominantly white schools in
the south was 43.7% has gone down to 23.1% in 2012.
Studies have shown that
when schools are diverse and integrated students of color tend to do better in
their classes. Students in predominantly white schools have access to better
resources, more funding and more effective teachers. Compared to schools who
have a high concentration of Black and Latino students, those schools typically
have lower graduation rates, less funding, and employ less experienced
teachers. According to the report in the Saint Louis area, nearly 1 in 2
Black children attend schools in districts that performed so poorly, the state
has stripped them of full accreditation. Only 1 in 25 white children are in a
district like that. That statistic really emphasized everything mentioned in
the report.
This report really
saddened me and made me really think about the injustices in education in this
country. The fact that schools are still funded by property tax, the graduation
rates in neighboring districts. In my current job I get to see these gaps
immensely. I will go to a high school that has brand new buildings, a 99
percent four year college acceptance rate. I will then travel to a neighboring
district where the 4 year college acceptance rate is only 33 percent, the
building look decrepit and the students don’t enjoy the luxury of even having
up to date technology. I once visited a high school in New York in which the
school stopped funding AP classes and couldn’t afford to hire any teachers to
teach Geometry or Algebra II so the students had to take it a community
college. Those two courses are required for admission at almost every 4 year
college or university. I think a lot about the disadvantages of these students.
It makes me think of opportunity and how precious it can be for those students,
and how those students have little room for failure in a society that is not
educating our children equally and fairly. It is even sadder to think that the basic right of a good education, is not a right that is given to everyone.
This week’s article speaks a great deal on the term colorblindness
that is being used a lot in mainstream media. The term colorblindness refers to
someone that does not see race. The authors describe colorblindness as
problematic as well as scientifically unlikely. In order to understand
colorblindness, one must first understand that white privilege gives those who
are not of a color the option to feel that colorblindness is a thing as opposed
to those who are of color who live in color-seeing word daily. In reference to
a study done by Fiske and Neuberg that determines that humans quickly place
people into categories or schema (category based processes) and that category
based classification serves as the default mode for perception. Category based
perception can occur automatically and outside of conscious awareness, the
study supports a conclusion that the brain makes colorblindness unlikely. The
study proves that whether we want to or not or brain uses physical attributes
to categorize and relate people to what our perception of race is. I have
attached the video below of a race study that CNN did a couple of years ago
that demonstrates the racial bias in children. The study demonstrates that even
small children have already begun to put students in categories based on their
race, and a good percentage have already begun to have negative connotation
towards a darker skin color.
How can colorblindness be hurtful to society?
Colorblindness can be hurtful to society because it invalidates
the existence of issues of people of color. Colorblindness isgood intentmasking“I don’t have to care”.If you are of an oppressed racial
makeup you have can’t choose to be colorblind and there are racialized systems
in place that work against you and your race. In the classroom to avoid the
discussion and to avoid that component of the racial makeup of your student’s
is to deny those students their struggles and the challenges that they face in
comparison to their white counterparts. I have included a hyperlink that
describes race statistics in America to better highlight some of the issues
that colorblindness can deny:
This is not to say that there should be pity involved, or that one
should guide discussions based solely on their hardships, but it is to raise a
general awareness and to be conscious of a student’s race and the plight that
comes with it. To be “colorblind is to ignore the racial biases that are
inherent in American society.
The authors of this week’s reading believe that we must us a
strategy called color insight in order to properly discuss race and defeat the
myth of colorblindness and a post racial society, we must acknowledge that
people have privileges or disadvantages based on their race. Color insight
refers to a process of thinking about one's own color to discuss race.
There are four steps in engaging in color insight,
1.Considering context for any discussions about race
2.Examining systems of privilege
3.Unmasking perspectiveness and white normalness.
4.Combating stereotyping and looking for the
"me" in each individual.
The last step in the color insight process really spoke to me.
"Looking for the me in the individual" is looking for a commonality
between you and someone of another race. I found that looking for the me is a
natural process. You tend to care more about an issue when it has to deal with
people that look like you. This advocates that one must accept people's
differences and to stop assuming that your normal is their normal and that just
because their normal is not your normal it does not mean that that their normal
is invalid. (WHOA what a run-on sentence, my undergraduate English professors
will be disappointed!) thus color insight reminds us to acknowledge our
differences and fight for a more equal society.
This
week’s reading for some reason, made me think about a young man named Kalief
Browder. Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old black male who was accused of
stealing a backpack. He was sent to prison without being charged and stayed in
prison for 3 years with no charges and no court date.
No
charges and no court date!
While
in prison he spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement and he tried to
take his own life several times. There was video coverage of him getting
assaulted by other prison inmates and correctional officers. He was threatened
daily by the correctional officers who were there to guard his man-made cage.
When he was finally released Kalief began to have hallucinations he once threw
his television out of his window claiming that the television was watching him
and lived in constant paranoia that he would be thrown back in jail. After his release he was quoted
saying:
People tell me because I have this case against the city I'm all right," he told the magazine. "But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back."
The
New York times published an article on him and an anonymous donor offered to
pay all of his college expenses. He began taking classes at a community college
in the Bronx. He even was able to meet Jay-Z and Rosie O’Donnell. The paranoia
started again and one day his mother had found that he had committed suicide in
his room, a victim of injustice and the prison system. He was only 22 years old.
In
my life I have never had a news story affect me as much as this one. I try not
to make everyday things about race but how could I not? I often wonder would
this have happened if Kalief was Kyle? Arrested maybe, but three years with no
court date, no trial and no charges. Highly unlikely. To be colorblind is to
not to be able to have an honest conversation on what people of color determine
are the issues that are plaguing their communities. To pretend that this could
have happened to anyone, is to pretend that the judicial system is color-blind.
To pretend that the judicial system is colorblind is to pretend that African
American males don’t account for 60 percent of the us prison population. To
pretend that our society is colorblind is to be blind.
He
