We have now spent 1 trillion dollars waging the drug war since it began. A trillion. Those funds could have been used for education, jobs and drug treatment in the communities that needed it most. We could have used those funds for our collective well being, instead those dollars paved the way for the destruction of countless lives, families, and dreams.

Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.

If the drug war was waged in those communities it would spark such outrage that the war would end overnight. This literal war is waged in segregated, impoverished communities defined largely by race, and the targets are the most vulnerable, least powerful people in our society.

There can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don't have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function.

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

I was inspired by what students have done in some schools organizing walkouts protesting the lack of funding and that sort of thing. There are opportunities for students to engage in those types of protests - taking to the streets - but there is also writing poetry, writing music, beginning to express themselves, holding forums, educating each other, the whole range.

The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were Black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate.