title:  Here’s How The NY Times First Wrote About Obama In 1990 — It Is Not Pretty (IMAGE)
text: A little more than 25 years ago, the New York Times ran its first profile on Barack Obama. Reading it now, it is stunning just how much has changed, and how much has not.The NYT was writing up 28-year-old Columbia University graduate Barack Obama for becoming the first black President of the Harvard Law Review. Looking at this piece today, it is difficult to understand how just 18 years later, he would become the first black President of the United States.Let s start with the headline: First Black Elected To Lead Harvard Law Review? Frankly, it made us think of the recent headlines about chimpanzees reaching the stone age.  But despite the tone of the piece, in which the tone of paternalism wafts out of the pages even a quarter of a century later, Obama is notably chill. He makes a point in 1990 that he continues to make, and is just as relevant, today. He told the Times: The fact that I ve been elected shows a lot of progress, it s encouraging.   But, he added,  it s important that stories like mine aren t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don t get a chance. There are the same fears of tokenism in 2016 and there were in 1990. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our systems of education, saw and justice.The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world.  This means a higher percentage of U.S. citizens pass through the prison system, than any other country on the planet.For most countries with comparable demographics to the US, there will be 100 prisoners per every 100,000 population. In the US, the rate is five times this at 500 per 100,000. But black men in the U.S. are incarcerated at an eye watering rate of 3,074 per 100,000.This is not because black men are somehow genetically more pre-disposed to crime, but thanks in large part to the school to prison pipeline.  The average state prisoner has a 10th grade education, and about 70% have not completed high school. The U.S. Education System delivers disadvantaged children over to prisons for profit.The American Civil Liberties Union described the School to Prison pipeline of the U.S. Education System like this: A disturbing national trend wherein children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, they are isolated, punished and pushed out.  Zero-tolerance  policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while high-stakes testing programs encourage educators to push out low-performing students to improve their schools  overall test scores. Students of color are especially vulnerable to push-out trends and the discriminatory application of discipline. The School to Prison pipeline starts with underfunded public schools. The schools are generally overcrowded and lack funding for qualified teachers, counsellors, special educational needs resources and even textbooks.  The children are clear from the get-go that their education is not being invested in   and these schools are normally in disadvantaged areas in the first place. There is no hope, no aspiration, no encouragement, no learning.The implementation of  zero tolerance  policies in schools have turned minor infractions into criminal offences.  This saw suspensions treble between 1974 and 2001  rising from 1.7m to 3.1m, and disproportionately impacting children of color.A combination of major under-resourcing and fear of school-based shootings has seen an influx of police in schools. Instead of teachers, many U.S. schools now have  School Resource Officers patrolling the hallways, criminalising standard misbehavior. Again, children of color are disproportionately represented in the statistics   making up 70% of school arrests made. So, what were these children arrested for?Where children should be being educated about positive and negative behaviours, they are being criminalised as young as six years old. Their educations are being suspended or ended due to these punishments and they are gifted to the prison system.The truth is, disadvantaged children in the U.S. have become a source of profit for the private prison industry.  Over the past four decades that private prisons were rolled out across the US, there has been a simultaneous explosion in crime. Did citizens suddenly become more criminal? No. Poverty was criminalised, and it made its way all the way into the school system.So, while it is shocking to see the nakedly paternalistic language of the NY Times profile from 1990, and think how much has changed   the situation remains staggeringly similar to the majority of the black community of the United States.Featured image from Vox