Quotes About Racial calculus

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.

In these ways, the racial distribution of groups in the prison population becomes a dramatic stage on which the rest of society works out, in various modes, its calculus of white supremacy. The racism within the prisons provides a platform by which the larger society continually sharpens up its racial calculus.