Bernard Harcourt Quotes
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.
Bernard Harcourt, Political Scientist, Attorney, and Legal Scholar, Quoted in Graeme Wood, “Freed Press”, The Atlantic, January / February 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There is a significant argument as to whether of not race should be used to try and predict the variables that will likely produce crimes. Some social scientists argue that virtually everything correlates with race {633357} and therefore the predictions are meaningless. Here, Kurtz argues that if you do not use race, since it does correlate with so much, then you might as well not try and determine the predictive factors of crime. Reality lies in the center, use race as one of the statistical variables but do not use it for profiling potential criminals and potential suspects unless there is observable and not deduced or inferred evidence of race in the crime.
Given that the Black population is less than 15 percent of the total, the odds against this occurring by chance is less than 100 million to one. The problem was then very hard to solve in that in most cases the cause was not anti-Black hostility. Rather it was that most police—including some Black police officers—were more fearful for Black males relative to white males and perceived themselves or the public in mortal danger much more often with Blacks than with whites in similar situations. Much of this was a historical societal bias and fear of Black males and much was the result of the disproportionate media depiction of violent Black males.
The governor had initiated a study of the implementation of the death penalty in Maryland.
At the time Thomas was the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In an informal discussion among some of the staff, a white employee was describing the difficulty he had encountered trying to get a bank loan. This quotation illustrates that Thomas has had an antipathy to affirmative action and racial programming or preferences well before he was appointed to the Appellate and later the Supreme Court.
The vast majority of the million Blacks in prison have been sentenced for using or selling drugs.
This quotation provides us with several important insights in American history. First, the Director of the FBI was an inveterate racist. Second, he felt no inhibition on sharing this discriminatory view with the Media. Third, he is yet another source for the fact that Blacks did not have a decent opportunity to get an education. There were some Southerners who maintained that they did have such an opportunity in the “Separate but Equal” segregated schools systems of the South. Hoover was not the only racist in the upper ranks of the FBI; most of the leadership was prejudiced. See {620621} and {74219} .
Johnson was then Vice President.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, he was told by a senator to lower his voice.
Althought most of Seale’s “solutions” were counterproductive and/or ineffectual, and the Black Panthers were regarded as public enemies, Seale was right about some of his complaints including this one. In most of the South the changes forced by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts where just beginning to have significant effect. So there were proportionately very few Blacks on Southern Juries. Even in the North, Blacks did not register to vote in proportion to their numbers so since jury pools were then usually drawn from voter registration lists, Blacks were statistically underrepresented. When a few Blacks were put on a jury panel, the prosecutor had the right of preemptory challenge as did the defense. But there were enough challenges so that the prosecutor could disqualify all the African Americans on the Jury. Even today, this is legal in many jurisdictions and although better than in 1970, then a Black defendant would rarely have African Americans on the jury of “his peers.”
A Southern Republican congressman with a voting record that was against minority interest, for the first time in American, interrupted and insulted the President of the United States in the midst of an invited Presidential Address to Congress given by Barack Obama, calling him a liar. Carter, himself a Southerner, recognized the motivation.
- Born: January 28, 1963
- Nationality:
- Profession: Professor Lawyer
Bernard E. Harcourt (born 1963) is an American critical theorist with a specialization in the area of punishment, surveillance, legal and political theory, and political economy. He also does pro-bono legal work on human rights issues.
