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.

Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they've committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they're ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

We can't just assume that this resistance is going to produce the kinds of candidates or the kinds of parties that will truly honor people of all colors, all backgrounds, all ethnicities, from every nation and every faith and every gender, unless we do the work in our own communities of organizing and being in deep dialogue with one another across all forms of difference. It's my hope that we'll seize this opportunity and not let the moment pass.