It's important to have people in your life who will applaud your ambition.
Kamala HarrisRead
I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.
Interpretation
Kamala Harris emphasizes her lived experience with the criminal-justice system's flaws rather than theoretical knowledge gained through education.
In this quote, Kamala Harris reflects on her deep understanding of the criminal-justice system, which is shaped not by academic study but by her personal experiences and observations of its impact on the black community. She underscores the importance of recognizing systemic injustices that many may learn about only in a classroom, while for others, these issues are apparent and lived realities that inform their perspectives and advocacy.
In practice
During a speech about criminal justice reform.
It's important to have people in your life who will applaud your ambition.
We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.
History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.
My mother... would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, 'I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?' You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
I was born realizing the flaws in the criminal justice system.
My mother was and will always remain my greatest hero.
The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.
Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
After decades of persistent, courageous advocacy - often at risk to their own lives, livelihoods, and safety - African Americans succeeded in securing their right to a voice in our government, and their work laid the foundation for the social justice work of generations to follow.
If we continue to tell ourselves the popular myths about racial progress or, worse yet, if we say to ourselves that the problem of mass incarceration is just too big, too daunting for us to do anything about and that we should instead direct our energies to battles that might be more easily won, history will judge us harshly. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch.
Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.
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