Jin Z

“But class divisions influence criminal justice debates in black communities in less obvious ways as well: they explain, for example, why black elected officials have been much more likely to speak out against racial profiling (which harms African Americans of all classes) than against unconscionable prison conditions (which have little direct impact on middle-class or elite blacks).23”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“gun crime: it wasn’t equally distributed throughout black America. Rather, it was concentrated among the poorest blacks, who were forced into living conditions that generated violence. Few”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“Keeping blacks subjugated required that they be unarmed. Alabama’s law was typical: “Any freedman, mulatto, or free person of color in this state” was forbidden “to own fire-arms, or carry about his person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”76 Blacks caught breaking the law were subject to incarceration—which, in the early twentieth century, often meant being sold into debt servitude and forced to work in conditions that approximated slavery. According to Douglas Blackmon, “In an era when great numbers of southern men carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the century become one of the most consistent instruments of black incarceration.”77”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America

“As the historian David Krugler explains, “African Americans were not so much rioting as fighting back, counterattacking, repelling violence; above all, resisting.”79”
― James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America