Education Not Incarceration for Young Men of Color
When people hear the name "Lil Wayne," music of resistance and social criticism is not what comes to mind. However, I was sitting in L.A. traffic last week when my friend played a song I had never heard before. It was Lil Wayne's "Misunderstood" from Tha Carter III album, and it resurrects an ugly monster that haunts boys and men of color across the country, and certainly here in Los Angeles.
Around minute three into the song, Wayne drops the facts about this monster, the Prison Industrial Complex. According to the song, the fact of the matter is "You see, 1 in every 100 Americans are locked up, 1 in every 9 Black Americans are locked up." Lil Wayne is not the first person to speak about the fact that we have chosen to deal with social problems through incarceration.
In the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, Michelle Alexander writes that "More African-American men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began."
Statistics and celebrities can only go so far to raise some eyebrows on this issue, but in Los Angeles