Never underestimate internalized racism. People can be oppressed, yet continue to express their oppression in their own choices.

To anyone who thinks systematic racism does not exist you're perhaps the most dangerous.

If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American.

you must treat this system like spoiled food, you'll get violently sick if you consume it.

We don't teach fear over here.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear, The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body, But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with a club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.