I Can't Breathe

1) "In many ways, Garner acted as if his own life and health were permanently damaged and disposable, not worth keeping in repair. All he really cared about was the money he kept flowing to his family. His life was ruined the day he got picked up for selling crack when he was eighteen. Maybe before that. But his kids had an unblemished future, so that's what mattered. And the only way he knew how to show that concern was with money.
Even in his interactions with police, the self-annihilating instinct came through. He was more than willing to go to jail, to sleep in the unventilated, urine-soaked air of the 120th Precinct house, so long as they left his money alone."

2) "In Floyd [v. City of New York], the city suddenly stopped denying that enormous numbers of people were being stopped for no good reason.
Instead, the city introduced two lines of defense. First, they said, Stop-and-Frisk had reduced crime. This was a curious nonanswer to a charge of mass civil rights violations.
More important, the city argued that it was not stopping people because they were black or brown. Instead, they were stopping them because black and brown people were statistically more likely to be criminals.
When asked to justify the fact that in 2011 and 2012, blacks and Hispanics represented 87 percent of all the people stopped, the city's answer was that 'approximately 83 percent of all known crime suspects and approximately 90 percent of all violent crime suspects were Black and Hispanic.'
Therefore, they contended, it was reasonable to be suspicious of the entire group.
This reasonableness also made it legal, by the city's logic, to stop anyone who belonged to those groups. In other words, in a court, before a judge, the city essentially now argued that they had falsified millions of Stop-and-Frisk forms. All of those reasons justifying the searches that the city's cops had cited on official forms countless times—'furtive movements,' 'bulges,' 'inappropriate attire,' etc.—were just convenient euphemisms. In truth, there was a single, blanket justification that covered 'reasonable suspicion' for at least 80 percent of those searches: they were black or Hispanic residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
The city's defense against accusations of profiling was to argue that profiling works."

3) "A large part of the tension between protesters and police lay in the explosive and impossibly complicated argument about race that had long divided the whole country.
On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap.
On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect towards authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair."

4) "Meyerson was still waiting for an answer from Judge Garnett after the Staten Island hearing. He didn't seem to be on the edge of his chair in suspense. The outcome seemed predictable. Still, he was troubled. The Garner case had raised thorny questions about what path any attourney should choose to take in a legal system that may not be functioning correctly.
Meyerson talked about a line from a book by Thomas Oliphant called Praying for Gil Hodges, about Jackie Robinson's Dodgers. 'Every important American story is punctuated by race,' the author wrote. Racial tumult is buried deep in the body of American society. Because of slavery and the fallout from it, it is, Meyerson reflected, our original sin. But we're unable to face it.
Like prisoners of ourselves, we seem doomed to repeat patterns over and over. Meyerson talked about the Kerner Commission of the late sixties, convened by LBJ to study the causes of race riots. LBJ had hoped to learn that some instigator or group was conspiring to turn otherwise patriotic black Americans to riots and protest. But the commission found just the opposite.
'The Kerner Commission said that the trigger point [of riots] is that police are viewed as an occupying force in black and brown communities,' he said. 'Fifty years later or forty-five years later, whatever it is, in Ferguson, reports will say the same thing, that police are viewed as an occupying force. Everything's changed and nothing has changed.'"

5) "It struck some people as odd that when America's white supremacist movement finally spilled out into plain view, it would be led not by a gap-toothed southerner but by a rich New Yorker in a power tie. But really it made perfect sense. For ages now New York has been at the center of every innovation in institutional racism, from redlining to blockbusting to the 'war on crack' to mass incarceration to Broken Windows.
Somehow it always comes back to New York."