The system of white supremacy has adults and children alike spinning trying to numb their pain through drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and anything else they can get their hands on. The need to avoid dealing with life and the true meaning it possesses goes unsolved as we walk aimlessly around searching for the meaning of our lives. The homicide rates of teens between the ages of 15-19 were about 8.9 out of 100,000 people in the year 2017, an increase of almost 30% in the comparison between 2007-2014. Alex Crosby, a chief medical officer at the CDC, told CBS News that it’s impossible to nail down any single factor that might be causing the increase in violent deaths among young people.
The pressure and need to fit into the social norms of today has our youth with less physical social skills. The pressure of living up to Hollywood, Celebrities and other star-studded individuals has given our children a false sense of security and reality. I believe these pressures have our kids committing suicide at an alarming rate. Our children are in desperate need of a tool that will equip them with the inner strength, focus, and determination to succeed in life. The art of meditation will provide your child with a great foundation for a strong mental fortitude needed to compete in today’s fast pace society. Meditation will provide them a strong base for a healthy life. Whether it’s five minutes at home, a class offered at your school or quiet time alone in your car meditation has been proven to make a drastic difference in the lives of its participants.
Good parenting is not just about giving your child a materialistic lifestyle. Rather, it is more important to orient your child with the healthiest lifestyle practices to establish the proper behaviors that will grant them the ability to reach the best version of themselves. The benefits are countless but three simple outcomes of a good meditation class for your child will produce the following:
You may expect your child to become more organized.
Expect a sharp improvement in concentration and cognitive ability.
You are likely to find your child to have higher mindfulness attention
So, starting meditation practices early, you are basically supporting your child to become more of a person of substance. It’s my experience that meditation will certainly establish you as a caring parent who is truly concerned about the holistic improvement and development of your child.
The top schools from all around the globe are including meditation classes within their Co-curricular and after-school activities. This establishes the fact that meditation practices can certainly make childhood days sweeter and more pleasant. The growth and acceptance of mindfulness as a society has made it more acceptable to adults and students alike. The steps t becoming a healthy young adult begins with a knowledge and understanding of our individual self.
If you can do something in securing your child’s future, the best thing would be to provide him/her with a quality lifestyle. Meditation practices are the most effective way to accomplish this objective with little or “NO” cost. Take the first step and sign up for our free class… https://black-kids-meditate.teachable.com
I look across the room and out of approximately 80 prisoners 65 were black or brown. A question quickly came to mind are black people naturally violent, poor and bad people? I made several poor decisions that landed me into this jail cell but man it’s a lot of black and brown people in here I thought to myself. The next question that came to mind changed my life forever. Why is it that this place is filled with black and brown people when white people commit crimes as well? This question was the spark that ignited a life long quest to understand the America in which we live today.
Inspired by Cornell West, the ADOS movement, and the school to prison pipeline researched I have decided to write this post to speak about how race has a direct connection to mass incarceration today. Dr. West spoke in the book “Race Matters”, that our human continuity is all connected in the life we share. Slavery, colorism, and the first caste system which would lead to the institution of what would later be called chattel slavery and evolve into what’s now mass incarceration. The violence displayed on people of color provides a clear insight into the conditions, the mindset of elite whites’ attitudes toward people of color. It drew clear lines for what they wanted from their darker-skinned brethren.
The moment white settlers reached the now called Americas “color” was defined and used as a method that would shape the political, economic, social and cultural development of the United States of America. People of color encountered views of inferiority, were deemed unworthy of wealth, resources and opportunities that this very land possessed. The outright design to exploit people of color through violence and in the name of religion was a surge to justify the horrendous rape, brutalization, murder, hanging, and the systematic massacre of people of color both physically and biologically.
The caste system that emerged led to the kidnapping of millions of Africans which turned into the American slavery we are accustomed to hearing about today. The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, declared all slaves in rebelling states to be free. This brave act of the then President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln allowed the slaves that have escaped the harsh life of a southern slave the opportunity to fight as a human being and to fight for his or her relatives that were left behind.
The proclamation gave the Union a sizable advantage by utilizing the newly freed negro which enabled them to gain momentum and success over the Confederate Army. The Thirteen Amendment of 1865 officially abolished slavery in the United States. The Civil Rights Act of 1875, that African Americans were guaranteed equal treatment in public accommodations, public transportation and prohibited their exclusion from jury service. Unfortunately, this newfound freedom was short-lived; because in just eight short years the U. S. Supreme Court declared parts of the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional to include the prohibition of racial discrimination in inns, public conveyances and places of amusement. Therefore, causing a dealing a reversal back to segregationally norms.
Another example is that in the case of Bailey v. State of Alabama. Alabama at the time had a law that facilitated “debt peonage”, which is a form of involuntary servitude. This, in turn, would become the foundation of legal slavery through the escalation of laws and policies to incarcerate people of color on trivial, trumped-up charges coupled with harsh sentencing to create a steady flow of free labor.
I am drawn to this social justice issue of prison reform because I have lived it, grown up around it and would like to identify its ties to the psychological effects of slavery, education, white supremacy, racism and a systematic caste system designed to focus or eliminate people of color from modern-day society. The privatization of the penal system and its demand on public policy, executive and judicial branches to feed its need for greed has led to unfair laws like the implementation of “Three-strikes” laws removed sentencing discretion that judges used to have. Under these laws, which started in California, a person is considered to be beyond rehabilitation after committing three crimes. As a result, once they’ve reached the “third strike,” the penalty is much more severe than it would usually be. Sometimes a life sentence can result from a combination of relatively minor offenses, just because the third strike requires the judge to impose a very long prison sentence. There are people today spending their lives in prison for committing three petty crimes.
The 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, which added significant mandatory minimums for many federal crimes and abolished federal parole. States followed, and soon mandatory minimums became a standard response to drug epidemics and crime spikes. What started as a well-intentioned attempt to impose uniformity became too restrictive, creating new disparities and injustices in the process. These punishments are inhumane and nonsensical, even from a public safety perspective. It costs money to keep people in prison, so a three-strikes law can result in the government spending $500,000 to incarcerate someone for committing three $500 crimes. “Truth-in-sentencing laws” eliminate those opportunities for early release, requiring people to serve (for example) 75 percent of their prison term physically behind bars.
The goal is to ensure that the sentence the judge imposes is what a person will serve in prison — in other words, “what you see is what you get.” Lastly, add the different sentences for different drugs, Generally, possessing 5 grams of marijuana will earn you less prison time than possessing 5 grams of cocaine. The idea is that more dangerous drugs should be punished more severely. But that hasn’t always been the case. Crack and powder cocaine are chemically the same substance. But possession of crack cocaine, which is more common in communities of color, is punished much more severely than possession of powder cocaine, which is more common in wealthier white communities. While somewhat reduced, this disparity remains, even after the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.
It is through proper education, a concentrated effort of all races to acknowledge and have a dialogue about race, provide job opportunities, and continuous development will we begin to see some improvement with race relations in America. The fact that Dr. West spoke about the unexamined life and how we have to critically examine ourselves, our lives, our history and die to the things that are not beneficial to ourselves is still key to the growth needed for our development as humans today. We must examine our lives to get out of the bubble and treat each other with dignity, respect as another human, human to human, blood to blood we have to look at each other as brothers and sisters in the journey of humanity. We have to eliminate the desire to be separate and this notion that any race is better than another because of the color of their skin. It is required that we stand against white supremacy which has plagued this nation and world to chaos and destruction instead of using our common traits to bridge gaps and unite to produce real change that this world and nation have yet to explore.
Bibliography
13th The Netflix film by Ava DuVernay (October 2016)
Constitution of America- 13th amendment
Davis, Angela (2017). Policing the Black Man, Racial Profiling: The Law, the Policy, and the Practice. Pantheon Books
Anderson, Claud Dr. (1994). Black Labor, White Wealth, A National Public Policy on Black People. Power omics Corporation of America Publishers
Sen, Shukdeb Ph.D. (2018). Black Education in White America, Segregation and Its Impact on Schools Newman Springs Publishing
Clarke, John Henrik (1993) Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust, Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism. A & B Publishing Group
Have you ever heard of the connection between schools & prisons? If, you are like common parents probably not…The school- to -prison pipeline is the process of criminalizing youth by carrying out disciplinary policies and practices within a school system that puts children in connection with law enforcement. In today’s society, it’s normal to see armed officers in school after decades of school shootings. The Columbine, Sandy Hooks, Red Lake, West Nickel, Parkland, FL and countless other school shootings have changed the dynamic of the learning environment for our children. As a parent, I welcomed these changes as a deterrent from future issues. What I did not know as a parent that there was a dark side to this protection we seek.
” Our children are being targeted to satisfy corporate greed and children of color are the number one victim“
Zero-tolerance policies that have been adopted by schools across the nation have unfortunately criminalized minor infractions of the school rules or policies that lead to students being pushed out of schools. These zero-tolerance policies have expelled students for things like nail clippers or scissors. What is this world coming too? These aggressive disciplinary policies push students into the justice system and the people of color are affected more than any other demographic. (1) With the lack of staffing, the school hallways are now patrolled like correction officers in a detention center. Today, a student is far more likely to gain an arrest at school, and in most cases, they are non-violent offenses like disruptive behavior. In the state of Ohio, up to 80% of the cases do not have lawyers present. (2) Given the alarming connection between suspensions from school and some engagement with the justice system, coupled with racial bias among police these numbers are common knowledge. The chances of a student that has any involvement with the justice system graduating are limited. (3)
The School to prison pipeline is one of the most stringent concerns among social workers and activists alike. The moment one takes a moment and looks deep into understanding the cause-and-effect of this dilemma has to be examined & disrupted. It’s only after this will we prevent the rising rate of the students-converted-to-criminals syndrome.
It will be relevant to account the finding of social research among students, conducted recently:
In Chicago, the total count of expulsions from school rises from 21 in the year 1999-2000 to more than 1500 by 2017-2018.
In between the same span, the instances of students’ arrest grew by 8 times.
My question to you… Is the adoption of the Zero Tolerance policy been for the betterment of the students?
Exclusion from studies means a student has hardly any work to do. So, how he/she is going to spend a span of 24 hours? It has been found that each instance of school exclusion, paves the way to enter the domain of crime. Here comes evidence to support this claim:
Nearly 80% of the juvenile offenders in New York have a history of exclusion from studies or is a school/college drop out
In 2017, nearly 60% of Juvenile offenders in Nigeria were excluded from schools and colleges.
Thus, school/college dropouts and exclusion from studies for any reason are likely to take the concerned student behind the bars.
Harsh Punishment is more likely to give birth to a criminal, rather than rectifying a student
Researches conducted among youth criminals have exhibited the fact that they committed their first offense to avenge for the humility of the harsh punishment they faced. As such, it is indeed needed to introspect for better ways to bring rectification in students, rather than treating them as grave offenders.
Give your kids the tools needed to control their emotions and make better decisions through the practice of meditation.
Advancement Project, Education on Lockdown: The schoolhouse to jailhouse track (Mar.2005), pg. 15
ACLU, The Children’s Law Center & The Office of the Ohio State Public Defender, A Call to amend the Ohio rules of juvenile procedure to protect the right to counsel (Jan. 2006), p.1
Provoke Academy 