Don Winslow Quotes

We send young white boys to the Army. We're sending young black boys to the prisons.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

What was happening was the war on drugs. That was the primary culprit I could see that was getting in the way of black progress.

For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

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

Too many whites are getting away with drug use...Too many whites are getting away with drug sales...The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too.

We need to have a conversation about the fact that black faces are not as visible as they should be, that there is huge inequality everywhere in terms of race.

Stop and search is an integral cog in a racially disproportionate criminal justice system.

Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order”.

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

What frustrates me is to see African-Americans behave as though what European-Americans say is worthwhile. It simply isn't. It's just some silly people who can make laws and have the power to enforce them. I'm often amazed at the conversations black people have about themselves. They ought to be having these conversations about white people. It's white people who are flawed and at fault.

I know that I am a black man in a white world. . . I know that I never had it made.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

Of course in this age of colorblindness, a time when we have supposedly moved "beyond race," we as a nation would feel very uncomfortable if only black people were sent to jail for drug offenses. We seem comfortable with 90 percent of the people arrested and convicted of drug offenses in some states being African American, but if the figure was 100 percent, the veil of colorblindness would be lost.

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

Many people don't realize that financial incentives have been built into the drug war that guarantee that law enforcement will continue to arrest extraordinary numbers of people, particularly in poor communities of color, for minor drug offenses that get ignored on the other side of town.

The media really only pays attention to white people. I think America is really racist.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

Black culture is cool, but black issues sure aren't, huh?