The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.
We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.
The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.
If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.
Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.
We don’t need police officers who see themselves as warriors. We need police officers who see themselves as guardians and parts of the community. You can’t police a community that you’re not a part of.
We’ve all been acculturated into accepting the inevitability of wrongful convictions, unfair sentences, racial bias, and racial disparities and discrimination against the poor.
The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison – that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.
In most places, when people hear about or see something that is a symbol or representation or evidence of slavery or the slave trade or lynching, the instinct is to cover it up, to get rid of it, to destroy it.
Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.
We all have a responsibility to create a just society.
We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.
I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.
Always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing.
If you’re just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you’re going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.
The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics.
Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.
That’s what’s provocative to me – that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.