The Hip Hop Anthropologist

   These “poorly-educated,” working-class white boys ain’t bullshitting. They want their country – read that: “privilege” – back : The unmerited advantage they recklessly wielded (and often employed) like a cudgel over the heads every other ethnic group in America since its official inception in 1492 by white Anglo-Saxon protestants (WASPs) ; repressed folks fleeing oppression and tyranny by the English Crown and Church of England for freedom in the remote wilderness known as America.     Trump got these hillbillie s so riled up they are amassing at the polls like the Syrian Army preparing to breach the gates of Aleppo . These hick s have really brought into Trump’s game: an empty slogan, “We gonna Make America Great Again” to inform their vote.    What kind of bullshit is that? Man, I wish I could pimp that hard. Shit, the only state we’d be in is a state of bliss if my game was that tight. Funny thing, there is not a brother or sist...

In 2000 Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the Late NYC Mayor Ed Koch famously announced a “second chance program” for non-violent, drug-offenders. Hugh Price then of the National Urban League, the NAACP’s Kweisi Mfume, and many other prominent civil rights and criminal justice advocacy programs, touted the initiative as a sane response to the “lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key” approach that had driven criminal justice policy with varying degrees of severity in this country; virtually since the inception of the United States prison system in 1796 on “the Hudson River’s east bank on Manhattan Island’s western shoreline, in Greenwich Village, a mile and a half north of City Hall.” Little has been said or done by Sharpton or Ogletree in the 16 years since to address the collateral consequences of criminal history records . Requests to Sharpton's Washington [National Action Network] office has not responded to requests for an interview. The “second chan...