Courtney B. Vance Quotes

In my neighborhood... they view the police as someone who comes to take their loved ones away.

As a black man, you run from the cops. It's different now, but back when I was coming up, you run.

It's always extremities when you are a young black male dealing with law enforcement.

Why aren’t Black people this outraged over Black-on-Black killings?.

Our country has a painful history of mistrust between police departments and people of color. The overuse of stop-and-frisk has made those divisions much worse.

I was raised to be very wary of the police. I was raised to stay away from them unless you absolutely have to. Because they're dangerous.

The black community has always complained about abuse from cops. It's nothing new. But now, more people are seeing visual examples of what they've been complaining about. That's one thing that has changed over time.

The stuff that the cops do and the stuff that happens, what bothers us, the black community, is it's so blatant... It's so out in the open that if you can't see it, then you are part of the problem because it is very obvious.

There is a reason that many African Americans have a healthy mistrust for law enforcement. We don't always feel protected or served by that particular institution.

I don't want my kids going through what I went through - police stopping you, searching you and all that malarkey.

I'm sure that you could go back and make a graph showing that all the killings of black males increased in times of economic difficulty. As a matter of fact, a black man was lynched last year.

Rosewood is what Americans did to Americans. We have to hold the mirror up... and look at ourselves. Sometimes that's an ugly sight. And sometimes you have to go through that pain - both black America and white America - so we can finally find some racial harmony.

For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

We need the cops, especially in the black community.

The black police in Compton are worse than the white police.

Not all cops are bad, but this kind of harassment has been going on for years in the ghetto.

As a black man, you learn at an early age the police are not your friends.

I remember my dad always complaining about getting pulled over. I remember the differences in school systems. I remember seeing police officers, not knowing their names, and knowing that they were there not to protect us, not to serve us, but to watch us.

We listened to Donald Trump speak at the debate about 'Stop and Frisk.' I don't think it's a good way to go through life. I don't think that's going to solve any of our problems. It's actually going to make racial tension a whole lot worse, and it's going to make us feel like we're singled out.

You have to know the forces that are against you and that are trying to break you down. We talk about the problems facing the black community: the decimation of the black family; the mass incarceration of the black man; we're talking about the brutality against black people from the police. The educational system.

Where I went to high school at was a predominantly white town, and I definitely got pulled over a number of times for driving in the wrong car on the wrong side of town. As you get older, you start to realize that at any moment, there could be a trigger, and that could be you in that situation.

Why wouldn't the police officers be on edge? Why wouldn't they be alert? And why wouldn't people in the community trust police officers? Because they are consistently harassing them, and they have experience with police officers doing awful things.

Being a woman of color, I can truthfully state that I don't feel safe around those who are sworn to honor and uphold the law.