With all the talk of racism in English football in the last few days, I have decided to grab myself a book on a topic that divides opinions and in which i know very little about. Racism, as far as I’m concerned, is rampant in all walks of life, though huge progress has been made since the 80′s.

I say this because, few week ago, i have read this wonderful piece of social commentary in New Yorker, even though it deals with the mass incarcerations in the 80′s and 90′s, and the failure of the American criminal justice system. A system the author better illustrates by saying:

“The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

Source: New Yorker

Recently, The problem for the authorities and society in general, have been the use of social media. A lot of racial animosity towards decent people(insert any politically correct word! Best i could come up.) with plenty of anonymity online. Even Micah Richards of Manchester City and England quit the social media site, Twitter as a result.

I hope to learn a lot from the book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. I will write more of my thoughts later on.

Between;

R.I.P Whitney Elizabeth Houston (August 9, 1963 – February 11, 2012)