One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery.
Randall RobinsonEvery people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis - it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor - all of that - without doing vast damage to those people.
Randall RobinsonI've always thought I had pretty good instincts for people. There is a short list of people I've worked with over my career with whom I've not been able to distinguish easily between the public persona and the real private person.
Randall RobinsonI got a chance to be in a society where the barriers between classes - social and economic - are not insuperable, where money is not everything all the time. Americans have been manipulated into a space by those who profit from the arrangements of that system. People feel a conscious disease - a dis-ease or an unease - but I don't think they know what causes it.
Randall RobinsonWe've been taught in America that big is best. That's why people have to believe that they must live in the greatest country in the world, which is absolutely idiotic.
Randall RobinsonSomething is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent. The business class is combined with the evangelicals. And I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ. So they are very happy about what we're doing to Iraq - and the menace we present now for Syria and for Iran - because they think that the apocalypse is an important thing to get into so that they can see vindicated their most literal interpretation of the Bible.
Randall Robinson