Shane Claiborne Quotes

It's impossible to separate our contemporary practice of the death penalty from our history around race and slavery, and specifically, lynching. Where lynchings were happening 100 years ago is where executions are happening today. And that's a haunting and eerie thing.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

Murder cases in which the victim was white were almost twice as likely to result in the death penalty as cases in which the victim was black, and blacks who killed whites were two and a half times more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who killed whites.

To be a black in a white society isn’t to stand on level and equal ground. While the races may stand side be side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. Until we overcome unequal history we cannot overcome unequal opportunity.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

I can see no ultimate good results that can accrue from the education of a race without planting in their being a hope of attaining the highest position in government affairs and society. In fact I can see no reason to expect that any man can be made happy by whetting his intelligence to that point where he can better contemplate or realize the hopeless gulf that must ever separate him and his race from the best things that the dominant race (who employ him as a servant) have in store for themselves. I believe that any person so situated would grow miserable, in proportion as he increased in intelligence…. Whatever tends to sour our natures, or that causes us to give way to passion or temper, tends to destroy us, and no cost should be considered in a matter so fraught with danger to the attainment of the civilization and Christianization of the world as will the attempt to compel these two races to live in the same territory.

We never discuss race until something bad happens.

Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace.

Does that mean that all vestiges of past discrimination would be eliminated, that the income gap or the wealth gap or the education gap [between Afro-Americans and white] would be erased in five years or 10 years? Probably not, and so this is obviously a discussion we've had before when you talk about something like reparations.

All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man.

In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the native. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian?

Yes, (Bush is a) racist. We all knew that but the world is only finding it out now. As Texas's governor, Bush led a penitentiary system that executed more people than all the other U.S. states together. And most of the people who died from (the) death penalty were Afro-Americans or Hispanics. (Bush) promoted a Conservative program, designed to eliminate everything Americans had accomplished so far in matters of race and equality.

Furthermore, the financial and social investment in prisons means that black and brown youth become, essentially, fodder for the machinery of capitalized incarceration. The steady supply of guns in the U.S. makes an already untenable situation even more dangerous, and all of us must raise our voices, write to Congress, hit the streets in protest, attend budget meetings of local municipalities - all to state our opposition to such criminal procedures and practices for our youth.

...The Court ...[recognizes]...the persistence of racial inequality and a majority's acknowledgement of Congress's authority to act affirmatively, not only to end discrimination, but also to counteract discrimination's lingering effects. Those effects, reflective of a system of racial caste [legal segregation and discrimination] only recently ended, are evident in our work places, markets, and neighborhoods. Job applicants with identical resumes, qualifications, and interview styles still experience different receptions, depending on their race.

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.

Yes, I'm an extremist. The Black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a Black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

Like Ice Cube asks, "Why are more niggers in the pen than in college?" It's easier to go to the pen than it is to go to college.

The black unemployment rate has to be twice that of the white rate in the US. If the national unemployment rate were 6.8 percent, everyone would be freaking out. We ought to not take too much solace in the 6.8 percent, but ask ourselves what can we do to bring that down to white rates, which are below 4 percent now. Some of that has to do with education, but that's just part of the story. You find that those unemployment differentials persist across every education level. I think it means pushing back on discrimination and helping people who can't find work get into the job market.

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