Stacey F. Beckerman Quotes

Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.

The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young, Black men. And it is killing Newark.

There are poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

The Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

The American people in general, and the black people in particular, must take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people. The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.

You, I, we all encounter behaviors that we might say, I wouldn't do that. But she has a huge amount of contact with how people live. She sees more hospices and sink estates than most people.

For goodness sake, will they hear, will white people hear what we are trying to say? Please, all we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.

There is a genocide that is taking place among black men, in particular young black men, but it is not a genocide being perpetuated by white cops, by the Nazis, or by the Klan. Unfortunately and tragically, it is being perpetuated by other young black men.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

Like his white brother in the U. S. A., the American Negro is a proletarian by compulsion and not by choice. He regards the bourgeoisie with adulation rather than antagonism and, like most other Americans, cannot see "culture" except in white tie and tails. His consuming ambition is to become a bourgeois himself, and in this he is a carbon copy of his white fellow American.

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

What began to weigh heavily upon me was that at the same time I was struggling to get my scholars and their families to believe in themselves, I was part of an educational system that despite its best intentions, only reinforced their failures.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

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.

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them.

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

Everybody in Detroit knows somebody who is in prison…. In Detroit, most of us are one incident from being locked up.

You’ve damaged yourself, you have damaged another person, you’ve damaged your peers, and quite honestly you have damaged your own race

In the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black office seekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.

When you live in a world in which juveniles are much more likely to be stopped—or if stopped, be arrested, or if arrested, be adjudicated—if they are Black, then all of the indicators associated with prior criminal history are going to be serving effectively as a proxy for race.

The commission of crime is not randomly or evenly distributed in our society. If you wanted to remove everything correlated with race, you couldn’t use anything.