For the past year on campus there has been much discourse on the status of students of color. While the state of Wisconsin's population is 13 percent people of color, the UW System is comprised of only 8 percent students of color. This glaring disparity becomes all the more abhorrent when you take into consideration Wisconsin's prison population is 59 percent people of color. It is difficult not to deduce that whites are tracked for college, and people of color are tracked for jail.
This week, the legislative conference committee will be ironing out the differences between the Senate and Assembly's versions of the budget. We need to ensure that our elected representatives are fully funding education and minimizing expenditures on the prison system. Whatever we build, we will try to fill. Unfortunately, the trend has been to build prisons and not schools.
For all of you who want to see more money go into K-12 and into the UW System; for those of you who do not want public money being wasted on 1984-esque surveillance and racist racial-profiling tactics, I encourage you to attend the kick-off of the third annual Hip-Hop Generation conference. We're going to commence the conference with a march from Library Mall to the Capitol Friday, April 19 at 4:30 p.m. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, will be speaking, along with artists, poets and labor representatives as we register people to vote. We need to let the conference committee know that only by funding education, by funding rehabilitation services that prepare prisoners for re-entry into society'which is cheaper than conventional incarceration'then, and only then, will we start moving toward a socially just, anti-racist society.
