Many unhoused people work full time but earn starvation, unlivable wages. Some struggle to access mental health services or substance use treatment, making earning a consistent and stable wage nearly impossible.
Cori BushRead
By expanding the legal authority of law enforcement agencies - without addressing the infiltration of white supremacy within law enforcement - we are expanding the capacity of white supremacy itself.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that merely giving law enforcement more power without addressing internal issues of white supremacy can worsen the problem.
Cori Bush articulates a critical perspective on law enforcement reforms, highlighting that increasing the legal powers of these agencies without tackling systemic issues, particularly the presence of white supremacy, may inadvertently empower those very ideologies. This statement urges a holistic approach to law enforcement reform that includes not just authority but also accountability and integrity from within.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion panel about police reform.
Many unhoused people work full time but earn starvation, unlivable wages. Some struggle to access mental health services or substance use treatment, making earning a consistent and stable wage nearly impossible.
The death penalty is an inhumane punishment that disproportionately violates the human rights of Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized people.
We don't live in a world that nurtures and cares for Black girls like me. And if the world doesn't care about a Black girl like me, then what will happen to our Black babies who grow up to become Black children and Black adults?
This stereotype that Black and brown boys and girls are dangerous or threatening has normalized systems of trauma: the cradle to prison pipeline, foster care, youth detention, and being tried and sentenced as adults. We treat trauma with more trauma.
Being unhoused in America must no longer be viewed as an individual shortcoming, but rather as an unacceptable, life-threatening policy failure.
We treat Black and brown kids who can't vote yet, can't join the military, can't rent a car or even buy a lottery ticket - like adults in our criminal legal system. We deprive them of their joy and their youth. Children who deserve to live rich and abundant lives.
When we let cops talk about themselves as a separate community, then we are letting cops wall themselves off from the rest of us. We don't generally do that with any other jobs. We don't talk about the barista community or the Wal-Mart greeter community.
Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity - whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth - to justify the brutal assaults against black people of all genders.
When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.
I'm for the poor man - all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. 'Every man a king' - that's my slogan.
I believe this system of mass incarceration would have Dr. King turning in his grave. There's no doubt in my mind that Dr. King would be doing everything in his power to build a movement to end mass incarceration in the United States; a movement for education, not incarceration.
Here are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big—big money, big businesses selling weed—after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing?
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