Celebrity Has No Value Unless It Can Support Uplifting Others

by Russell Simmons

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When we were growing up in Hollis, Queens in the ’70s, there was not a single person who wasn’t affected by the drug epidemic that began to ravage our community. Before President Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” in 1973, black people in America were already feeling the devastating effects of addiction and poverty. It wasn’t to anyone’s surprise, that after the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, there would be new roadblocks manufactured to stop the impeding progress of black people across the country. I don’t think anyone would have imagined that the war would have raged this long; one that has failed miserably at curbing drug abuse and sales, but has accomplished it goals of incarcerating more people than any other nation in the world, most of whom are black and brown. The “New Jim Crow” has systematically destroyed the fabric of the black community, as Michelle Alexander brilliantly explains in detail in her book with the same title, however things are beginning to shift.

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