I think that the next step, respectfully, and I have attempted to allow you, and I feel like we have allowed space for a nice conversation and it is a pleasure and an honor to be in this dialogue with you but I think that a huge part of what you haven’t said is that you have offered a recognition that mass incarceration has not worked, and that it is an unfortunate consequence of government practices that just didn’t work. but the truth is that there is an extremely long history of unfortunate government practices that don’t work that particularly affect black people and black families, and until we as a country, and then the person who’s in the seat that you seek, actually addresses the anti-blackness current that is america’s first drug.
we’re in a meeting about drugs. america’s first drug is free black labor, and turning black bodies into profit and the mass incarceration system mirrors an awful lot like the prison plantation system. it’s a similar thread, and until someone takes that message and speaks that truth to white people in this country so that we can actually take on anti-blackness as a founding problem in this country, I don’t believe that there is going to be a solution.
because what the conversations that are happening now and why there is so much cohesion across the divide, the red side and the blue side, it’s because of money, right, we are spending a lot of money on prisons. we’re spending more money on prisons than we are on schools, but if we look at it from lens of let’s solve this financial problem, and we don’t look at the greater bottom line that african-americans who are americans are suffering at greater rates than most other people, every other people, for the length of this country then it’s not going to go away. it’s just going to morph into something new and evolved. you know, I genuinely want to know, you, hillary clinton, have been in no uncertain way, partially responsible for this. more than most. there may have been unintended consequences.
but now that you understand the consequences, what in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country? like what in you—not your platform, not the things you’re supposed to say—like, how do you actually feel that’s different than you did before? like what were the mistakes, and how can those mistakes that you made be lessons for all of america for a moment of reflection on how we treat black people in this country?