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TO BEN JEALOUS
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“We can’t be the country that we want to be so long as we keep using prisons to solve every social problem,” said NAACP President Ben Jealous last March after a talk in Washington, D.C., a city where estimates are that three out of four young African American males will do time. “We’ve got to get back to doing the hard work of saving lives, of investing in redemption and believ[ing] that Americans are certainly no worse than every other person on earth.”
The money spent on prisons is “bankrupting our states. It’s bankrupting our public higher education system,” said Jealous. “In a state like California, UC tuition is going up… and there’s no way to explain that without acknowledging that California is one of five states that spends more on incarceration than public higher education… Literally, the prison budget has overwhelmed the public university budget in California [and] it’s doing that in states across the country.”
Jealous, the youngest-ever president of the NAACP, said, “We’re the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a lot of folks continue to trip over different words. The ‘Colored People,’ at the time, referred to people who weren’t white. Just that simple. People who were on the receiving end of colonialism. Frederick Douglass was very explicit, these are people from Africa, from Asia, from Native America, from Latin America. That’s what ‘Colored People’ referred to. ‘Advancement’ and ‘Association’ meant that this was a group of people who were down for, who were invested in lifting up four-fifths of humanity to a place where all of us would be equal.”
Jealous said, “What we do at the NAACP, how we succeed, is we dream bold dreams, we pursue them through pragmatic strategies, we manifest them through hard work, and we sustain ourselves through faith… It’s what we’re teaching our children because the reality is that the kids of today have big problems to overcome, have big dragons to slay, have big dreams to be made manifest. What’s old is new again. We’ve got to teach them how to look at a problem that’s way bigger than they are, break it down to achievable steps, and as they say down in Mississippi ‘slow walk that problem,’ step by step by step till they win.”