A couple of weeks ago, I facilitated a workshop at the Teachers for Social Justice curriculum fair with my friend and colleague Erica Meiners. The goal of our session was to share resources about how educators and organizers can talk with young people about the prison industrial complex.

I received an e-mail last week from one of the participants of the workshop. She teaches high school here in Chicago and with her permission I wanted to share a question that she asked: “How do I convince my black male students that prison is not a rite of passage for them?” I had to take a deep breath after I read this.

Over 40 years ago, George Jackson wrote:

“Black men born in the U.S. and fortunate to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations.” – (Blood in My Eye, 1972).

Jackson’s words are frankly more relevant today when there are over 850,000 black men in prison and jail than they were in the late 60s. This weekend, I heard a panel discuss youth activism in the era of Black power. The panel was organized in conjunction with a screening of the film Black Power Mix Tape 1967-1975. One salient point made during the discussion was that in spite of the hardships that Black people faced in the 1960s, there was a sense of hopefulness that permeated the culture. The Black Freedom Movement helped to engender that hope; this has dissipated in our current historical moment. Hope has been trumped by intractable unemployment and poverty. Hope has been displaced by a sense of despair that is easily transformed into nihilism.

Yet there is resistance to this sense of despair. You have to look to find it but it is there. You can hear it in the righteous anger (and unfortunate misogyny) of Tef Poe’s anthem “Everybody’s Strapped” as he raps about the Oscar Grant case, police brutality, the prison industrial complex, the fecklessness of politics, and the abandonment of poor people by the state. “Recession in the air. Economical terror. Black President but shit is feeling like the Reagan Era…”

Needless to say that I certainly do not have THE answer to the teacher’s question except to say that we have to try everything to reach the young people in our charge. We have to provide individual support that convinces them that they are valuable.

Sometimes as a way to spark conversation with young people about the value of being Black, I like to use the following clip of Martin Luther King:

We also need to mobilize to transform society by uprooting structural oppression. This is obviously a heavy lift and will take time. However, I am a big believer in the importance of supporting young people to develop their leadership through studying social movement history and learning concrete organizing skills. I think that this is another way that we can reverse nihilism and offer hope.

Finally, I think that drawing on the portrayals of the justice system in hip hop and rap music to engage young people in discussions about their lived realities is incredibly valuable. On Friday, I organized a workshop featuring Jasiri X about how to engage young people through hip hop. In my opinion, he is an artist and educator who is doing this exceptionally well. Some of his videos about the Oscar Grant Case and the Jordan Miles Case can serve as excellent conversation starters about police brutality and about criminal injustice.

Taken together, I hope that these suggestions offer a starting point for the teacher and her students.