Opinion

Hip Hop Generation Conference to promote voting, racial equality, activism

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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 Wisconsin 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 education and the UW System and 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 3rd annual Hip Hop Generation conference. We’re going to commence the conference with a march from Library Mall to the Capital Friday at 4:30 p.m.

Representative Marc Pocan 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 and rehabilitation services that prepare prisoners for re-entry into society, which is cheaper than conventional incarceration, will we start moving towards a socially just, anti-racist society.

Pabitra Benjamin,

UW-Madison student