Thread by @Mikel_Jollett

For the record, and I can’t believe I have to say this, but gang members aren’t animals either.

I worked with gang members in south central LA FOR YEARS.

These are mostly young boys without strong family structure or money being preyed upon by violent career criminals.

It doesn’t not matter if Trump was talking about all immigrants, asylum seekers, or gang members.

The whole point is once you decide a certain class of human being is beneath human concern, you open the door for atrocity and barbarism.

I met young boys who were told they either had to defend the turf or they themselves would be murdered.

I knew 13 year-olds who had witnessed unspeakable acts of violence and were basically walking around with trauma and ptsd in the middle of puberty.

Are they less human because they don’t come from a lily-white family in the lily white suburbs?

Does their pain not matter because they were out in juvir at 10 years old by racist white cops?

Are we to pretend that empathy is finite and some horrors can be ignored?

This entire way of thinking (“people who’ve committed a crime aren’t human”) is backwards, reductionist horseshit which absolves a racist criminal justice system which places young boys in bondage and then profits off their labor, all while blaming them for their struggle.

You want to call yourself a Christian? Then you forgive the repentant.

You want to say you’re an “enlightened progressive?” Then recognize that incarceration in the United States drastically INCREASES the likelihood of future crime when it should be the opposite.

I notice people I admire on this website TALKING OUT OF THEIR ASSES on this issue and I won’t have it.

These boys are human and most of them have seen more pain than you will ever know.