The fact that more than half of the young black men in any large American city are currently under the control of the criminal justice system (or saddled with criminal records) is not - as many argue - just a symptom of poverty or poor choices, but rather evidence of a new racial caste system at work.

We would never throw up our hands and say to those white boys - well, too bad, if you had just stayed away from marijuana or not dealt dope to your friends when you were 18 you wouldn't be serving a life sentence in prison right now. You wouldn't be locked out of jobs, unable to even get work at McDonalds. No, instead we'd say, "What's wrong with us as a nation that we would condemn so many of our young men to a life of poverty, exclusion, and scorn simply because they made a few mistakes in their youth?".

Black men in ghetto communities (and many who live in middle class communities) are targeted by the police at early ages, often before they're old enough to vote. They're routinely stopped, frisked, and searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

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.

If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.

Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what "is" that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

My fear is that we will mistake the brand, the "resistance," for greater unity than actually exists and wind up settling for any Democrat the next time around. We have an opportunity right now to build much greater consensus about the need for a meaningful alternative and building a truly transformational movement, town by town, city by city, that has the potential to help birth truly revolutionary change in this country. That potential exists. We got a glimpse of it when such enthusiasm erupted over a democratic socialist Bernie Sanders running for president.