A Coatesville teacher asked her class what do you want to do for an occupation, a student replied, drug dealer.

The teacher was stunned when the student said he wanted to be a drug dealer. She asked why he wanted to be a drug dealer. The student said, we make a lot of money.

I can understand why someone, particularly a poor person sells drugs. If you don’t have a skill that’s in demand, a skill in a legal business. The jobs available don’t pay much. And even a street slinger in Coatesville can make a good amount of money in a short time. 

But it’s an UN-comfortable living. And a career selling drugs could be short because it’s a life threatening career that can put you in prison for a long time. 

Watch Aadil Malik speak his poem "Education".

Young black men might think the drug selling business is cool and dangerous. But they're fools. They're being duped. They're conned by the drug business owners. And the huge con on black people, the decades long, Republican Party long-con was started by Richard Nixon in 1968:

“According to Watergate mastermind and former Richard Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, the then-president launched the notorious (and ongoing) war on drugs in 1971 to disrupt that administration's two greatest perceived threats: black people and antiwar leftists. 

‘The brazen quote surfaced in the April cover story  of Harper's magazine that was written by Dan Baum and went online Tuesday. The reporter recalls an interview back in 1994 in which Ehrlichman bluntly explained the whole thing. 

‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?" Ehrlichman told Baum. ‘We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

"EDUCATION", A Spoken Word Poem by Aadil Malik

I spoke to Aadil and his father in back of Chertoks Store a few days ago. 

I think he earned the title "Coatesville's Poet." 

the guardian

Black Americans incarcerated five times more than white people – report

Data analyzes racial disparities in state prison population 

Oklahoma and New Jersey among states where disparity is 10 times or more