For the rest of their lives, [black men] can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon.

It's important to teach students about the reality of the system, that it is in fact the case that they are being targeted unfairly, that the rules have been set up in a way that authorize unfair treatment of them, and how difficult it is to challenge these laws in the courts. We need to teach them how our politics have changed in recent years, how there has been, in fact, a backlash. But we need to couple that information with stories of how people in the past have challenged these kinds of injustices, and the role that youth have played historically in those struggles.

The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: "There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?"

For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.

We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind

The vastly different sentences afforded drunk drivers and drug offenders tells us who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not. Drunk drivers are predominately white and male.

I hope that we will also take seriously the necessity of building alternative parties, and do that work in our communities of organizing movements of movements, creating safe spaces and sanctuary, coming into dialogue, figuring out what a common platform might be for all of us, and building on the work that is happening elsewhere around the community. Even as we resist Donald Trump, doing so with an eye toward building a truly transformational, even revolutionary movement that can become a meaningful alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties.