Henry Giroux Quotes

Our criminal-justice system has for decades been infected with a mindset that views black boys and men in particular as a problem to be dealt with, managed, and controlled.

If you are a black person growing up in America, chances are pretty good that you have experienced the police pulling you over in front of your mother's house because you 'had a headlight out.'

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.

Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.

From racial profiling and being pulled over just for 'driving while black' to this new phenomenon of killing unarmed people out of some preconceived idea of fear, our lives and our children's lives are not being valued.

It is more dangerous to be black in America. It's both more dangerous because of the crime ... but it is more dangerous in that you're substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don't respect you or where you could easily get killed.

There are some policemen who overuse force, especially when there's an African-American involved, regardless of age.

I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Americans live in a country where African-American young men are twenty-five times more likely to lose their lives at the hands of the police than their white counterparts.

The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

There is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police.

African-American men are more likely to be killed in police incidents, stopped and searched, and sentenced to longer prison terms than white men convicted of similar crimes. Behind these statistics are heart-wrenching stories of lives cut short and families ripped apart.

We've actually seen Black man murders [in] many a major city in the United States - New York City, St. Louis, Missouri, from Cleveland to Baltimore. It was those sorts of incidents that were very much prevalent in the forefront of that jury's conscience that allowed them to believe that this man [O.J. Simpson] could have been set up.

Take crack cocaine. Particularly in the early days of the policy, ninety percent of the people being arrested were black, even though they didn't use the drug at higher rates and even though their numbers in the general population are so low. How could that be? The thing is, you place all your resources in communities of color. And if you do that, you're going to arrest black people.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

We have to face up to systemic racism. We see it in jobs, we see it in education, we see it in housing. But let's be really clear; it's a big part of what we're facing in the criminal justice system.

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Black men in ghetto communities (and many who live in middle class communities) are targeted by the police at early ages, often before they're old enough to vote. They're routinely stopped, frisked, and searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

Many White people are not sensitive to the kind of abuse that African Americans, especially younger African Americans, receive at the hands of police officers and police departments. I think for most Whites their experience with the police has been good or neutral because they don't interact with the police as much as those in the Black community.

We've got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system.

I am the unarmed black kid who maybe needed a hand, but instead was given a bullet.

The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.

Race prejudice is the devil unchained.

Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African American kids are unemployed. It is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.