[Applause] before I begin I just once have exa quick question of the audience of how many people know exactly where you came from or where your ancestors originated you could raise them high okay mostly everyone well for me this is a concept that I struggled with and still am struggling with as well as many other black Americans in the United States when I was elementary school I attended Watson see Conley Elementary it was a nice little Elementary School in the far north east of Philadelphia we had our school trips and bake sales and school fairs and things like that the average household income in this area was about $70,000 so pretty good schools are funded mostly from local property taxes so if you're surrounded by million-dollar homes or things like that and you're gonna have a lot of property tax revenue being fed to your school unfortunately to attend a school like that in kindergarten I was the only brown face in my entire classroom so imagine only five of you in this audience being black that's how I felt every day when I was at school since I was the only one in my class of 90 in second grade I remember being assigned a culture day project our second grade teacher asks us to put a fake picture of a flag on a poster board and talk about our cultural traditions and dances and things like that when I went home and I told him about the assignment she told me that I couldn't complete it because I didn't have a flag to represent and I didn't have any cultural traditions or dances to talk about before the 1900s now being 18 I realized how many things slavery has actually stripped away from me and as I grew older I wondered why did I go to school with all white people and now I realized schools filled with faces that look like I mean didn't have those consistent teachers textbooks art classes and things like that if I had went to a school like Strawberry Mansion for example Strawberry Mansion is one of the poorer neighborhoods in Philadelphia they have a sign on their door that says come back to school they have a hundred percent minority enrollment 97% of those minorities being black and 99% economically disadvantaged the socioeconomic status in this area is only about $20,000 which allows for little to no funding for the schools to have extra college preparatory and SAT prep skills the students in those schools have to walk through detectors every morning and we wonder why in 2018 of slavery was 400 years ago why do we still have this educational attainment gap in disparity the answer to that is historical oppression during times of slavery slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write the South Carolina act of 1740 stated that who shall hereafter teach or cause any slave or slaves to be taught or write in any form will be fined $100 and in some cases even killed if they were giving education to a bunch of slaves even 200 years after this the n-double-a-cp was protesting school segregation there were black schools and white schools the white schools had regular government funding and the black schools had minimal funding you see that the little boy has a sign that says why treat our children like prisoners and I have a theory that the public education system is feeding directly into the prison industrial complex instead of the government providing the public education system with more money to uplift those minorities being oppressed instead they are targeting them in schools and then that money is being fed into the prisons to keep them in the state of inferiority this is known as the school to Prison Pipeline the school to Prison Pipeline referred to this growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions primarily zero-tolerance policies and directly in or indirectly and to adult and juvenile criminal detention centers so a student will come to school with their pants egged and they'll say well that's gang activity or they'll come with a sharp pair of scissors and they'll say that's weaponry some statistics of this are 40 percent of students expelled from US schools each year are black 70 percent of students involved in in school arrest are referred to by law enforcement or black or Latino black students are three and a half times more likely to be suspended than whites additionally black and Latino students are twice as likely not to graduate high school as whites and 68 percent of males and state and federal prison do not have a high school diploma this can infer that those 68 percent had to drop out of school or were incarcerated before they even had a chance to graduate and then for those of us like myself who over the years had to sacrifice our culture in order to get a proper education and who didn't have to go through this in high school then we're faced with this question HBCU or PWI an HBCU being historically black college or university and a PWI being predominately white institution so how many of you know what Spelman colleges for example okay that's about 2% of the audience so Spelman College is the number one HBCU it's an all black woman's College in Atlanta that's a school that I got accepted to and this is a question that I was faced with just this time last year I was stuck between whether to go to Spelman College or Carnegie Mellon University I obviously chose Carnegie Mellon in hopes that I could change this minority rating statistic but I wanted to go to Spelman so I could have someone to braid my hair and talk about our grand mom's cooking but also have great academic resources but then here I would be exposed to academic resources but then also have someone who would look at my resume know the name on it at Carnegie Mellon now when I walk through every day I am faced with societal alienation when I look around in my classes I'm the only black female in all of my classes sometimes the only black person in my class is this makes it difficult for me to achieve and to climb the socio-economic ladder so it's just this constant pattern of us or it's black people having to sacrifice our culture in order to get a proper education and then we also get backlash from the black community the black community who has stuck in their community or in that cycle of inferiority may look at others who have tried to achieve as that we're trying to be better than them and the black people who have surpassed might have an issue with should we go back and try to help our community or should we continue to prevail and help ourselves so as we continue to try to educate ourselves we're also losing our sense of self this is this inferiority cycle that I was speaking about a child is born into poverty they struggle academically in scale Inquisition they fail to get a job so then they result to crime or selling drugs so then they get arrested that financial trouble keeps them in poverty then their families born into poverty then their child's born into poverty and this is a cycle that has been in continuing for years so I kind of want to test this in the audience today can I have everyone in the audience raise their hands high and keep them there so I'm going to access series of questions if it applies to you keep your hand raised if it does not put it down so keep your hand raised if you have ever felt different than someone else okay pretty much everyone keep your hand raised if in high school you have ever had a class size larger than 40 keep your hand raised if you ever had a peer get pregnant at a young age keep your hand raised if you have ever felt discriminated against keep your hand raised if you ever felt that you couldn't do something or you were told that you couldn't do something because of your race now keep your hand raised if one of your peers or family members has ever gotten shower killed so look around and we have about six seven people and I believe they're all black so this is the cycle that I'm speaking about and this is the cycle that still affects our community today this is an issue that US minorities are discussing every day within our communities because us or our family is going through it but this conversation needs to be brought into the majority as well the school to Prison Pipeline needs to be dismantled so that students are being uplifted in school and not pushed down as well as more government funding into those low socio-economic schools like Strawberry Mansion so that those students can have equal chance to exceed this conversation should be something that everyone discusses not just minorities so that we can try to change and if you see something if you see something that seems like it's not right or that you you see an opportunity for you to step in and change you should do so so I hope that we can break this cycle and that minorities can have the same playing field as everyone else thank you