Kelsey Schindl, a senior at Lincoln High School in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, knew the prom poster was wrong when she first saw it a few days ago.

The poster features a black-and-white silhouette of a young lady in formal wear, her body made up of words in large print: fearless, honest, decisive and charming. Other words appear in smaller font: classy, polite, tidy, quiet, dependable, potential.

Above her head dangles the slogan: "A night to protect her character."

What appears to be the principal's signature sits below the figure, alongside the logos for The Crossing of Manitowoc County, a non-profit, Christian-based pregnancy services and counseling organization, and Holy Family Memorial, a regional Catholic healthcare provider network.

Over the past 24 hours, Maryland politicians have been referring to angry citizens as “thugs” after the mostly peaceful protests over 25-year-old Frieddie Gray’s death became violent yesterday.

Much of the media attention has been focusing on the destruction of property, which was what Fox News reporter Leland Vittert wanted to discuss when he approached City Councilman Nick Mosby on the street last night. Mosby would have none of it.

When Vittert asked Mosby what the looting means for Baltimore, Mosby replied, “What it is is young folks of this community showing decades old anger, frustration, for a system that’s failed them. I mean, this is bigger than Freddie Gray. This is about the socio-economics of poor, urban America.These young guys are frustrated, they’re upset and unfortunately, their displaying it in a very destructive manner. When folks are under-educated, unfortunately, they don’t have the same intellectual voice to explain it the way other people are doing it and that’s what we see through the violence today.”

Vittert appeared to have taken none of this in, and then asked Mosby about the looting and a burning store near them and said, “Is that right?”

The councilman gave a poised response.

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Baptist pastors ranted, whooped, and stormed across the pulpit before a cheering crowd last week at a teen camp meeting.

The event took place April 11 at Middle Tennessee Baptist Church, where the fired-up pastors bellowed gibberish and ran into the crowd, where they slapped hands with the congregation.

Others chanted like auctioneers, danced jigs, or strutted around in exaggerated fashion, swinging their jackets over their heads.

Standardized tests have long been a source of controversy. Students fear them and parents and many teachers believe that the tests eliminate critical thought and narrow students’ educations.

Worst of all, standardized tests can be very demoralizing to students who don’t score well. So much focus during the school year is spent on standardized tests, often to the exclusion of music and the arts, that students may begin to believe that the tests are a measure of intelligence, a measure of self-worth.

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So try and wrap your head around the two statistics cited above: 1) Six people (Walmart heirs) have passive net worth - the money is inherited through stock; they don't need to do anything to earn it - equal to more than the bottom 40% of the people in the US; and 2) It would take a Walmart employee working a 12-hour day a million years to earn just one Walmart heir's financial assets.

Think of these two figures as the 2016 political campaign unfolds and you hear many politicians call for an increase in "economic opportunity." It is a disingenuous term because it implies that the problem with the economy is not that money has been massively redistributed upward in the last few decades, but rather that we need a more "pro-business" environment. This is a canard, because loosening regulations and lowering taxes on the wealthy over many years has led to a giant economic chasm between the haves and have-nots, not narrowed it.

Income inequality is going to be talked about a lot less, by Republicans and most Democrats. Income inequality, when fully exposed, explodes the myth of trickle down economics in which wealth, in reality, is redistributed to the rich from the pockets of the working class and poor. The Republicans - and most Democrats - who excoriate those who bring up income inequality and scoff that it evokes class warfare have no objection to reallocating money from the vast majority in the US to the wealthy. They object to an income distribution shift only when it is brought up on behalf of returning that appropriated money to those who actually earned it.

There are much larger issues of financially restructuring the US economic system to be debated than just returning to the status quo before the great income shift facilitated by neoliberal economics. However, as a practical reality, for the 2016 election, the discussion is going to be limited to those who claim that they are advocating increased "economic opportunity" and a much smaller group of politicians who call for an economic redistribution of wealth back to the workers and poor of the United States.

Forget the top one percent, the top 0.01 percent of Americans gave nearly 42 percent of all political donation dollars in the 2012 election cycle. Just over 30,000 individuals contributed nearly half of all money. It is no coincidence that this proportion has increased steadily as economic inequality has increased. In 1990 when I was born, the figure was just under 13 percent. If we expanded the scope to the full one percent, you can be damn sure they gave the overwhelming majority of dollars in recent years.

Candidates devote 80 percent of their time to begging rich people for money. Any extremist Republican can get a billionaire sugar daddy. The world's eighth richest man can summon the entire Republican primary field to kiss his ring. Millionaires are now complaining about being ignored in favor of billionaires. The average member of Congress is a millionaire.

It should come as no surprise that policymakers look after the ultra-wealthy instead of the rest of us. This trend of increasing economic and political inequality shows no sign of abating. Inequality is incompatible with democracy and it has created a plutocracy. Republicans like Marco Rubio are even proposing abolishing capital gains taxes in an all-out assault on those who actually earn their income.

One of the stars of the Hunger Games movie series called several pop stars on the carpet for appropriating black culture in a nearly 5-minute critique of the music and fashion industries, NBC News reported.

“The line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is always going to be blurred,” 16-year-old Amandla Stenberg says in the video. “But here’s the thing: Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed as high fashion, cool or funny when the privileged take it for themselves. Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in.”

The video, titled “Don’t Cash Crop My Corn Rows,” began as a school project but got wider attention after being posted online. Stenberg shows clips of singers Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry engaging in the behavior in both their attire and, in Cyrus’ case, her emphasis on “twerking” while using black women as “props.”

“What would America be like if we loved black people as much as black culture?” Stenberg asks.