Arrested on Charges of Unemployment

I woke up listening to Chuck Berry a couple of days ago. "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," was playing and then Chuck Berry goes, "arrested on charges of unemployment," leaving me to perform a few google searches. Was there such a thing as being charged with: "unemployment?"
 
Enough googling and I was able to confirm that the song was inspired by a visit Chuck Berry paid to several working-class areas of California, where he saw a woman pleading to a police officer for the release of a Hispanic man who had been charged with "loitering." I wasn't super impressed, people get charged with loitering all the time, but it's almost the same thing as being arrested for unemployment. You either play the game our capitalist system has established for you, or that capitalist system will profit from you in a private prison. And though loitering might seem excessive, the truth is that our capitalist system will destroy the lives of minority men for any imaginable reason. It's a system that doesn't help a man when he's down, it's a system that kicks him in the ribs and places him in a hell hole where reform is not the objective.
 
In 2000, there were more black men in prison than there were in college. This was not the case 30 years ago, as there were 143,000 black men in prison, and 463,000 in college. There were three times as many black men in college as there were in prison. Ronald Reagan's military escalation of the domestic war on drugs changed that figure, and by the year 2000 there were almost 800,000 black men in prison, and almost 200,000 fewer in college [exact figure not available.] The war on drugs was essentially a war on black men, with Hispanics not far behind.
 
And Chuck Berry sang about a woman crying for her man's freedom, perhaps to some avail. His song should be an anthem, for drug use is often exacerbated by unemployment, and unemployment is exacerbated by incarceration. Today, there are neighborhoods where 1/3 of the black residents cannot vote, can have no hope of gainful employment, because the same system that arrests him when he's down, also makes sure that his record is for life stained. So, the depression that existed when that man began to use drugs, perhaps to hide the economic pain of living in the ghetto, perhaps to forget a racial insult, perhaps to forget the legacy of discrimination, well that depression turns to anger.
 
When I first moved to the Bronx, I was assigned to CES 65, a predominantly African-American school. My father took me to the school and upon noticing that a large number of the pupils were African American, decided to transfer me out. My father didn't speak English, and his wife was black Dominican, so the decision was not motivated by race, but by emotion. And indeed, the first thing he warned me, the day before I started school, was to stay away from the blacks because they were always angry. I was taught to look down on black people and to stay away from them because they were "emotional."
 
And though my father was only vaguely aware of African American history, even those that are extremely knowledgeable fail to understand the anger, the depression, the humiliation that on a daily basis accompanies being black. Not only do we not understand those emotions, we criminalize them, and punish the individual who self-medicates, who in some way tries to cope with the unforgiving system created by our corporate overlords. Though the civil rights movement is often heralded as a success, it's an ongoing battle that is being lost by the millions of Americans who are disappeared into our thousands and thousands of incarceration centers.