Shaun King Quotes

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

Most of today's black convicts have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous order.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

The whole reason behind my album 'Free TC' is seeing all that police brutality, injustice, mass incarceration.

I think the O.J. Simpson case conjured all the paranoia, the racial anxiety, but also the racial fatigue that America has endured over the last half century.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

The primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color - and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

Freddie Gray was a story I followed closer than others, for whatever reason, in this larger narrative of police brutality.

I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

We make violent cops, we make violent criminals, and no wonder we have shootouts in slums all of the time.

Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most 'cos you don't realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

I have no hatred for cops. I have hatred for racists and brutal people, but not necessarily the cops. The cops are just doing what they're told to do.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda …. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

The idea that cops need to intimidate people of color, to violate our rights in order to protect people of color is like some Islamist societies’ saying the only way to protect women is to keep them under Sharia law.