(dramatic music)
- [Man] Black men account for roughly 6.5%
of the US population.
They make up 40.2% of the prison population.
- We now have more African Americans
under criminal supervision
than all the slaves back in the 1850s.
- Throughout American history,
African Americans have repeatedly be controlled
through systems of racial and social control
that appear to die,
but then are reborn in new form
tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.
You know, after the collapse of slavery,
a new system was born, convict leasing,
which was a new form of slavery.
Once convict leasing faded away,
a new system was born.
A Jim Crow system that relegated African Americans
to a permanent second class status.
And here we are, decades after the collapse
of the old Jim Crow,
and a new system has been born again in America,
a system of mass incarceration that once again,
strips millions of poor people,
overwhelmingly poor people of color,
of the very rights supposedly won
in the Civil Rights Movement.
- If you looked at the history of
Black people's various struggles in this country,
the connecting themes is the attempt to be understood
as full complicated human beings.
We are something other than this
visceral image of criminality and menace and threat,
to which people associate with us.
- When you cut on your local news at night,
you see Black men being paraded
across the screen in handcuffs.
- Black people, Black men and Black people in general
are over-represented in news as criminals.
When I say over-represented,
that means they are shown as criminals
more times than is accurate
that they are actually criminals, right?
Based on FBI statistics.
- [Man] The Bureau of Justice reported that one in three
young Black males is expected to go to jail
or prison during his lifetime,
which is an unbelievably shocking statistic.
- The objective reality is that virtually no one
who is white understands the challenge
of being Black in America.
- Civil Rights Activists began to be portrayed in the media
and among many politicians as criminals,
people who are deliberately violating the law,
segregation laws that existed in the South.
- The prison population in the United States
was largely flat throughout most of the 20th century.
It didn't go up a lot, it didn't come down a lot,
but that changed in the 1970s,
and in the 1970s, we began an era which has been defined
by this term, mass incarceration.
- This is a nation of laws,
and as Abraham Lincoln has said,
"No one is above the law, no one is below the law."
- I think one of the most brilliant tactics
of the Civil Rights Movement was this transformation
of the notion of criminality.
Because for the first time,
being arrested was a noble thing.
Being arrested by white people was your worst nightmare.
Still is for many African Americans.
So what they did, they voluntarily defined a movement
around getting arrested.
They turned it on its head.
- It's with the Nixon era and the law and order period
when crime begins to stand in for race.
- If there is one area where the word war is appropriate,
it is in the fight against crime.
- Part of what he talked about was a war on crime,
but that was one of those code words,
what we might call dog-whistle politics now,
which really was referring to
the Black political movements of the day,
Black power, Black Panthers, the anti-war movement,
the movements for women's liberation
and gay liberation at that time,
which Nixon felt compelled to fight back against.
- Historically, when one looks at efforts
to create reforms, they inevitably lead to more repression.
- And so if we leave it up to them,
what they're gonna do is they're gonna
tinker with the system,
they're not gonna do the sort of change
that we need to see as a country to get us out of this mess,
and they're certainly not gonna go backwards
and fix the mess that they've made
because they're not ready to make that admission.
But as a country, I don't think we've ever been ready
to make the admission that we have steamrolled
through entire communities and multiple generations
when you think about things like slavery
and Jim Crow and all the other systems of oppression
that have led us to where we are today.
- Once somebody is arrested and convicted, they're gone.
Nobody particularly cares about them.
In many ways, the prison system are sort of in the dark.
- So it makes it a lot easier, you know,
cognitively and emotionally,
it makes it a lot easier to say, send people there.
- If you look at the whole problem,
you say what are we doing?
We have too many laws locking too many people up
for too many things,
giving them sentences that are too harsh,
putting them in prison.
And while they're in prison,
doing very little, if anything to rehabilitate them
so that they can re-enter civil society when they get out.
- You can tell the story of white leadership in America
and never mention the FBI one time.
You can't tell the story of Black leadership,
not one, without having to deal with the full weight
of the criminal justice system
weaponizing its Black descent.