September 17, 2006

  • "Only 23,000 black men earned degrees from colleges and universities in the United States in 1990. In the same year, 2.3 million black men and black juveniles passed through the nation's jail and prison systems."
    -Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace

    This kind of statistic is quite alarming. While I don't know what Mr. Kozol used as his sources for this, but I would like to compare it with the statistics for other ethnicities. Certainly, I don't solely blame black men for their troubles. There is inequality in this society. The system is as prejudiced as people are. After all, it is people that created the system.

    How can we change it? We have to know our rights. Part of those rights are being politically active. Being a political agent is so important to our well-being. Yet so many people either don't know how politics affects them, don't want to learn, or don't think their vote matters. Yes, we each only have one vote. Yet many of my friends also have one vote. Altogether, we have thousands of votes. On MySpace, my profile says that I have 110,990,149 people in my network. That could very well be 110,990,149 votes. That has to matter.

    If we don't know the rules of the game, how can we win?