Michelle Alexander at Riverside Church NYC: New Jim Crow convict under-caste

I remember when I was younger, a man called my father to inform him that my uncle, a man who was once-upon-a-time, destined to go to the NBA, had just overdosed and was laying out somewhere on the streets of Long Beach.

That wasn't the first call, or the last. And if you are African-American, in the United States, someone in your family has been destroyed and/or gravely affected by the wave of drugs that were dumped into the US in the 70s to neutralize the growing angst and youth power that challenged government policies.

Shortly thereafter crack hit our country like a social implosion.

It is as if we have amnesia, when this new war on drug emerges and the political industrial complex widens. Who will fill these walls. Well, the same people who have been doing so for years, you.

Especially as the economic gap becomes something similar to a Saharan desert, a gap that is like a sinkhole.

Check out Michelle Alexander's talk that explores how the prison industrial complex is the new Jim Crow, or a social-racial-class caste system.