Racial Disparity
In California Black children are 10x more likely than white children to be incarcerated.
There are unequal proportions of young black and brown bodies inside of the American juvenile justice system. Mass incarceration of young people of color has its historical roots, but the data that exists today speaks loudly of the institutional inequalities that exist in our policies and laws. These stories are here to remind you of the lives and communities that are at stake. Clicking on each picture will reveal staggering data, but also the young voices that are caged yet brave enough to speak.
“There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”- TONI MORRISON
“It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.” - JAMES BALDWIN
“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” - CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
“It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.” - TA-NEHISI COATES
“Segregate people into boxes of ghettos, barrios, closets, and prisons, rank the boxes as being fundamentally separate and unequal, and keep the entire system intact by forbidding individuals to get to know one another as fully human beings.” - PATRICIA HILL COLLINS
“Your voices matter, your dreams matter, your lives matter. Be the roses that grow in the concrete.”
― ANGIE THOMAS
“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise!” - MAYA ANGELOU
“A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.” - JAMES BALDWIN
“But freedom is somehow always conditional here. ‘You’re free,’ they keep telling us. But she would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free. Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.” - JESSE WILLIAMS