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Tuesday, August 18, 2015

The Prison of the Mind [On Kalief Browder] | The Jose Vilson

The Prison of the Mind [On Kalief Browder] | The Jose Vilson:

The Prison of the Mind [On Kalief Browder]



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“You see, mama? This is why, sometimes, I’d rather just be in jail. It’s much easier than this. This is too much.”
Richard had just passed away, a victim of his own addiction. The syringe, found seven stories under his lifeless carcass a few hours afterward, had injected a high-inducing substance mixed with an adulterated chemical that slowly switched his nervous system off. His brother was either speaking jibberish or speaking from his heart depending on the listener’s perspective. I’ve heard it too many times, but this time was particularly poignant.
Richard’s brother preferred the normalcy of the gated cells to the uncertainty of what the rest of us consider real life.
Prior to his passing, I hadn’t seen him in almost a decade. It had been so long that I forgot what he actually went to jail for. We lived a few buildings apart, my building facing the ave and his building facing the river. As youth, I remember him as a young man with ambitions with enough charisma to make us believe he could do anything he put his mind to. As time passed, though, this ambition had him bobbing and weaving the very streets I faced. He landed in jail for a crime we weren’t told about, and he wouldn’t tell us after he got out. Their humanity is erased, and criminality subverts them as human beings.
When they pass, they’re not seen as victims even as the current they’re swimming against needs more than wooden oars and life jackets. 
So when I heard of Kalief Browder’s passing, I thought back to my cousins who’d ever done a stint in jail, and the offerings they needed to make to the jail gods to make it to their release date. The justice system doesn’t just fail our system from the point of entry into steel-gated rooms. It starts from birth, and having to swim twice or thrice as hard to meet what the rest of the country considers The Prison of the Mind [On Kalief Browder] | The Jose Vilson:

Chicago Organizers Lead Hunger Strike to #SaveDyett High School | Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools

Chicago Organizers Lead Hunger Strike to Save Dyett High School | Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools:

Chicago Organizers Lead Hunger Strike to Save Dyett High School

Chicago Organizers Lead Hunger Strike for Dyett High School 
  Tweet your support to #SaveDyett, #WeAreDyett & #FightForDyett

Dear Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools Family,
Today, 11 parents, teachers and community supporters began a hunger strike at Dyett High School on the south side of Chicago in order to finally win our sustainable community school, the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology Academy. Dyett will be the hub of a "Sustainable Community  School Village" with 6 primary feeder schools.
Three years ago, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel announced the closing of Dyett High, the last open-enrollment public high school in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood. Despite the fact that charter schools in Chicago have been a huge and consistent failure, even according to the Walton Family Foundation-funded CREDO study, Rahm has been steadily opening more and more of them as he systematically closes and defunds our public schools.
In Bronzeville, we refused to allow the destruction of our own public high school. We kept the school open until June, and then we won a commitment to reopen it from Rahm’s own appointed school board.
But the reopening of Dyett as a sustainable community school, the school all our children deserve, is in doubt. Chicago Public Schools promised to make a final decision on August 26, but now they have taken the issue off of the Board of Education’s agenda. Will CPS instead turn our school over to a corporation to run it as a citywide “contract” school, denying entrance to local students?
We cannot allow that. I am joining in the hunger strike today, and I urge the people of the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools family across the country to join me in whatever way you can.
We are using the hashtags #SaveDyett#WeAreDyett and #FightForDyett, and we would love if you could join us on Twitter.
If you stand with the 11 strikers, let us know by emailing us at info@reclaimourschools.org. We'll be sure to send you updates as the hunger strike progresses. We hope we can count on you as we move forward to win the schools all our children deserve.
Yours for the schools all our children deserve,
Jitu Brown
Executive Director, Journey for Justice Alliance
Member, Coalition to Revitalize Dyett High School
Chicago Organizers Lead Hunger Strike to Save Dyett High School | Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools:




Save Schools: Fire the savage editor who stooges for corporate education reform. | Reclaim Reform

Save Schools: Fire the savage editor who stooges for corporate education reform. | Reclaim Reform:
Save Schools: Fire the savage editor who stooges for corporate education reform.

The days of the Tribune as an actual daily newspaper are over. The Trib is a mega-corporate propaganda machine that kills trees to print hatred, and it imitates an actual American newspaper as defined by respected schools of journalism.
The Trib supports the privatization of public education in order to enrich the corporate education reform investors in the rich-boys’ private club, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. The Trib supports spending millions of dollars on useless, corporate education reform’s high stakes tests. Those rich boys are also drooling over managing and looting teacher pensions and other public employee pension funds for their own private profit.The Trib blames the victims who are teachers and other public employees.
Destruction for profit is vulture capitalism.
Crisis capitalism. If there is no crisis, create one. Corporate controlled media outlets such as the Tribune shriek destruction as they claim salvation.
McQueary1
What can we do about it?
First, let’s distinguish between nostalgia and good-riddance.
I remember years ago when I designed, printed and sold bookplates (Those small adhesive backed “from the library of” labels.) with designs of the Tribune, the Art Institute, Marshall Fields, etc. directly to the stores and offices of those institutions. After I delivered packages of these to the Tribune and the Oak Street Bookstore in the Drake Hotel, I walked along old Navy Pier talking with fishermen. I ate at Rocky’s Fish House at the base of the pier. I sat along the concrete pier edge, dangled my legs over the lake water, and Save Schools: Fire the savage editor who stooges for corporate education reform. | Reclaim Reform:


Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 8/18/15


SPECIAL NITE CAP 

CORPORATE ED REFORM



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