The Hip Hop Anthropologist

   Unfortunately, many of the reactionary, knee-jerk comments i n the NY Times piece The Scourge of Racial Bias in New York State Prisons by Michael Schwirtz, Michael Winerip and Robert Gebeloff on December 3, 2016, r eflect why radical prison reform is practically impossible in this country; especially in the wake of the contentious 2016 presidential race as an administration - comprised predominantly of aggrieved white ethnics strikingly similar to the rural, isolated communities many of the guards and institutions are located - comes to national power.    Many of these same people would be outraged if the ignorant, racist guards (many who can barely read or write) treated an animal - e.g., pet, dog, cat, gerbil ex cetera - in the same despicable manner they treat these inmates (or other guards who happen to be black. Interestingly, I read no comments on systemic racism impacting black guards) with little or no oversight or accountability. ...

Deluding you and your cone hat-wearing, pot-bellied drinking buddies with made-up facts does nothing to instill guilt in either me or any other progressive black educated in American post-secondary educational institutions. When your stinking, STD-ravaged, murderous, inbred forebears were brutally eradicating the East Coast of Native Americans in the early 1500s for WASPs to settle there, ours were being forcibly removed - primarily from the East and West Coasts of Africa - by barbaric Portuguese slavers with the assistance of rival African tribes who had no clue about what they were about to subject their fellow Africans; and, consequently, winded up in slave trading posts up and down the [American] colonies, before being shipped into the Deep South where they were forced under the whip to pick [cotton from sun up to sundown in the malaria ridden, venomous snake and insect infested, sweltering swamps] your forebears into an envious system of prosperity that has never been known ...