"Peril is generational for black people in America -- and mass incarceration is our mechanism for maintaining that peril."

"For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement lasted for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration—a period that overlapped with Jim Crow. This provides a telling geographic comparison. Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police state. Rates of incarceration were not that high—they didn’t need to be, because state social control of blacks was nearly total. Then, as African Americans migrated north, a police state grew up around them there, too... By 1900, the black incarceration rate in the North was about 600 per 100,000—slightly lower than the national incarceration rate today.

That early-20th-century rates of black imprisonment were lower in the South than in the North reveals how the carceral state functions as a system of control. Jim Crow applied the control in the South. Mass incarceration did it in the North. After the civil-rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the tactics of the North, and its rates of imprisonment surged far past the North’s. Mass incarceration became the national model of social control. Indeed, while the Gray Wastes have expanded their population, their most significant characteristic remains unchanged: In 1900, the black-white incarceration disparity in the North was seven to one —roughly the same disparity that exists today on a national scale."

Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration
The Atlantic
October, 2015

The Bend in the Arc of History

"I don't ever want to loose sight of how short my time is here.  And I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.  I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well.  Our story is a tragedy.  I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me.  It focuses me.  After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief, is destiny.  And if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of being proven right.  No one -- not our fathers, not our police, and not our gods -- is coming to save us.  The worst really is possible.  My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can't happen.  And my ambition it to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves -- just as my ancestors did."

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Notes from the Eight Year
We Were Eight Years in Power