In the early morning hours of May 29, CNN reporter Omar Jiménez was arrested by Minnesota state police on live television. Jiménez was calm and asked the officers what they wanted him and his crew to do, but they did not respond and instead handcuffed and arrested him.  

 “What am I under arrest for?” Jiménez asked as he was being turned away from the camera’s view and being escorted by police to what the viewer assumed would be jail.  The cameraman, Leonel Mendez,  continued to film Jimenez as he was perp walked until he fell out of view.

A black reporter being arrested on live TV while covering the protests in reaction to police killing yet another black man—during a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting black Americans—has filled me and millions of fellow Americans with an overwhelming sense of despair and pain. I feel broken. 

I woke up to all of this after a restless night. The president of the United States’ responded to a police officer kneeling on the neck of an unarmed black man, until he stopped breathing, by threatening people who were angered and grieving another senseless death.

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he wrote on Twitter. The tweet was flagged and deleted by Twitter.

It’s a decades-old law-and-order phrase that has been given new life by Trump.

But make no mistake, this is bigger than one man. It’s bigger than one year. Bigger than one election. This problem has been 400 years in the making, festering throughout American society even as “black faces in high places”—as the Princeton Philosopher Cornel West eloquently put it—seemed to signal a new beginning for this country. 

It was all a facade. Some of us knew that then, but more are suddenly coming to grips with this uncomfortable reality. 

My only option, though, like many generations of black Americans before me, is to somehow, someway find a morsel of hope to continue. This is a sad maxim of being black in this country, but it’s also a survival mechanism. 

If we lose this sense of hope, no matter how fleeting it may feel at times, then what else is there for me to continue for? I’ve promised to keep myself from thinking about the answer to this question for too long. 

Instead, I’m trying, though sometimes failing, to find things that bring me hope for a better future. And don’t get it twisted, this is not a naiveté or blind hope. It is a feeling that is sowed by the diversity and youth of the protesters across the country. 

From Dallas to Brooklyn, Minneapolis to Atlanta, Los Angeles to Washington D.C., an overwhelming number of those protesting are millennials or younger. These protesters are black, brown, white, Latinx, Asian and the like. They are straight, gay, trans, non-conforming and non-binary. Simply put, these protesters come from all walks of life—informed by intrinsically different lived experiences. 

The one thing that unites these people, however, is a shared sense of outrage over a society that has been broken for far too long. Quite literally pushing up their bodies against a system and society that was never built for them. The levels of empathy exhibited by those protesters among my generation is inspiring, and it provides me with the hope to continue. 

And it is precisely this hope that will prevent this wicked society from breaking me, no matter how broken I currently feel.

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Audience members at Riverside Church await the start of the panel discussion regarding the closing of Attica Correctional Facility. Photo by Alaia Howell

Nearly 3,000 attendees filled the pews and gazed down from balconies at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights yesterday to hear the likes of Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Cornel West, Marc Lamont Hill and Joseph “Jazz” Hayden publicly call for the closure of Attica Correctional Facility.

As part of the 41st anniversary of the deadliest prison riot in U.S. history—which left 39 people dead—the Correctional Association of New York coordinated yesterdays evening’s event, which included a book signing and panel discussion.

Executive Director Soffiyah Elijah of the Correctional Association of New York said, “The legacy of Attica is a blemish on New York,” and called Attica Correctional Facility “symbolic” of the nation’s prison system.

In September 1971, over 1,000 inmates at Attica Correctional Facility sparked a four-day riot in reaction to brutal living conditions of the prison. The inmates seized control of the prison in an effort to make negotiations with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

On Sept. 13, 1971, Rockefeller ordered the New York National Guard to regain control of the prison by opening gunfire on the prisoners, resulting in the deaths of 29 inmates and 10 hostages.

The Attica riots have since been a benchmark for discussions on civil rights and racial issues within the nation’s prison system.

As recently as last year, four prison guards at Attica were indicted on felony charges of assault against a prisoner.

Panelist Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University, civil rights advocate and author of “The New Jim Crow” addressed why prisoners’ rights are relevant more than 40 years after the Attica riots occurred.

“Mass incarceration reflects a fundamental choice of how we are seen as a global citizen,” said Alexander. “In terms of capitalism and how those at the bottom will be dealt with.”

The powerhouse panel of speakers discussed a wide range of issues including solitary confinement, stop-and-frisk practices by police, and the “prison industrial complex,” a term coined to describe the rapid increase in prison populations and its relationship to socio-economic divides in the U.S.

“This started out with a discussion with me and Pam Africa for the Mumia [Abu-Jamal] book-signing, reserving a room at Riverside and hoping that we could fill up that little room,” said Marc Lamont Hill, associate professor at Columbia University and co-author of “The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America.”

“Tonight is a start because it gets us in the realm of ideas,” said Hill, who during the discussion asserted that there is a “direct connection between first-class jails and second-class schools.”

Sergio Bejarano, 25, a student at Queensborough Community College and member of Students United for a Free CUNY, a multi-campus coalition of students aimed at getting quality education for the working class through free higher education, attended the event with some of his fellow organization members. They all wore red shirts to symbolize solidarity.

“The discussion tonight gave me a positive outlook on how we can create a paradigm shift,” said Bejarano. “We need to connect the dots and critically criticize the Obama administration.”

During the panel discussion, philosopher and activist, Dr. Cornel West critiqued the current diplomatic climate.

“I see political paralysis of two political parties in a tie to Wall Street and vengeful corporations,” West said. “It has been the black freedom movements and anti-racism movements that have reminded America that when America was about to go down, you either renew your democratic possibilities or you become another state of shapeless xenophobia.”

The speakers made a call-to-action for audience members to engage in the efforts against mass incarceration, particularly stressing the role of young adults in the movement.

“I think students are the movement,” said Hill. “Symbolic resistance, if it gets organized, is powerful. We can’t have an anti-prison movement without students at the center of it.”

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