Yesterday’s English class was very powerful to me. It was powerful in a sense because I know it’s something that has impacted people close to me. In our reading of Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy”, we’re following Stevenson’s career as a lawyer for those who’ve been falsely convicted or harshly sentenced. The book alternates between Stevenson’s experiences including the founding of his organization the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to the encounters of many of the different clients he’s tried to help. Walter McMillian’s story is the central focus of the book. Walter McMillian is a black man who was wrongly sentenced to death for a murder charge he didn’t commit. At this point in time, I’ve only read half the book and it’s already overloaded with so much emotion from the injustice that it’s at times infuriating.

Here’s are a few shocking statistics pulled from the book:

• “We [The United States] has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.”
• “One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison.”
• “One in three black male babies born this century is expected to be incarcerated.”
• “Black men are eight times more likely to be killed by police than whites.”

Additionally, Bryans Stevenson’s book has brought up many thought-provoking questions regarding the American justice system and ultimately argues that the system is too quick to punish and condemn when mercy is severely needed. “The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.” Perhaps the biggest question is why are people being judged unfairly? Is there a racial prejudice in these rulings or is it just a coincidental pattern?

We’ve also taken a brief look at Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”. In it, (or at least from what I’ve read) Alexanders outlines a new system of oppression among blacks in comparison to old Jim Crow laws has re-emerged in the form of mass incarceration. This can best be connected by another quote from Stevenson’s book. “Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. We’ve created laws that make writing a bad check or committing a petty theft or minor property crime an offense that can result in life imprisonment. We have declared a costly war on people with substance abuse problems. There are more than half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.”

I didn’t really intend on filling this blog post up with quotes but perhaps they say what I wanted to convey very effectively. I am a black man, and I understand that I live in a world where my people have been marginalized as a result of the figures above. I don’t want to sound so cynical but from the stories (the instances in history, books such as these, the frequent news reporting, accounts from my own family, etc.) knowing that these issues are still at large in the current year can sometimes be disheartening. At the same time, however, efforts from individuals such as Bryan Stevenson and the EJI, the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and current movements such as Black Lives Matter, shows that we’re not stagnant people and we are actually doing something about it. I look at people like Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey and more–those people have defied the odds against them. The only direction from here on is up.

A conversation I had yesterday with a classmate reminded me of about one of my favorite pastimes, that is PC building. Over the years, the PC (or the personal computer) has managed to find a way in many of our everyday lives. Whether it is used at school, at work, or in your home, many of us come into contact with this technology one way or another. Personally, PCs have played a huge role in my life. At around age five or so, I remember when my parents started investing in getting one of these machines. When it finally arrived, it was a Hewlett-Packard Windows XP based machine and I think my parents bought it specifically for word processing. They also used a calendar creation software which deemed useful for their business. This strange machine was unheard of to me at the time, but I soon got myself acquainted with using this device and the numerous software it included. Eventually, I found myself spending hours creating random documents of “keyboard mash”, differently themed calendars using the calendar software, works of art on the popular MS paint software, and losing sleep to that 3D Pinball Space Cadet game the Windows operating system came with. I feel that these actions were the initial spark for my interest in computers.

As I got a little older, I needed to start using the computers for some actual productivity. Unfortunately, the computers we had started to become obsolete over time and couldn’t keep up with our needs (well, more specifically, it couldn’t keep up with my needs, my folks were pretty content). It would frustrate me when one of the computers would malfunction and we had to pay someone to get it fixed. This inclined me to start experimenting with by taking some of the broken computers apart to get an idea of its inner workings and how they function. Instead of constantly having to go to my local computer service shop, I would ultimately try to fix the things myself in a “do it yourself” fashion. This took quite some trial and error. I broke a few devices in the process, but in some cases, I actually managed to get the computer working again which really surprised me.

Later on, around my mid-teens, I discovered that you can actually build your own PC from scratch (well not really from scratch, but you can select from a number of parts to assemble into a working machine). While this can appear mundane to some people, after all, it is just a computer, I saw the craftsmanship behind the idea of customizing your PC build to your liking and your needs. It was like a form of art to me. It gave me a similar feeling to how people view furniture for their home. So with me being a little older and finally having my own disposable income, I set out to start saving up for my first PC build. I mentioned earlier in my blog intro bio that I’m a gamer, so I built this PC with gaming as the main focus. It took quite some time in researching for the right components that were in my budget and figuring out what goes where, but with the help of several YouTube videos, forums, and message boards, I finally got my PC up and running.

Now, I won’t lie and say it was the easiest thing in the world, however, it was relatively a straightforward process that took some time and patience. While I was doing research for my first PC build I noticed a lot of people liked to equate the building process describing it as “Lego for adults”, and while that may be true in some aspects, it is a little more complicated than that as you have to make sure that those “Legos” fit well and are compatible with each other. Despite all that though, I found my first PC build a very fun and enjoyable process.

Unfortunately, I never documented my first attempt at building a PC, however, I have done so for some of my other builds. There is this website called PcPartPicker where people can share their PC builds and give PC building advice to those looking for it. People really demonstrate their craft well on that site as some of the builds on there look out of this world. Here’s a link to my profile on that website; there you can check out some of my work. The photos you are seeing in this blog are also from my profile on that website. Nowadays, I like building PCs for friends and family, but one day I would like to expand that at start building for customers. Who knows? Maybe it could be a business one day.