Almost no one refuses the police when confronted on the street or in a train or plane or train station. When you're confronted by the police, very few -- either the foolish or the very brave -- will refuse consent when confronted by the police.

Whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.

Public housing projects as well as private landlords are free to deny housing to people with criminal records. In fact, you don't even have to be convicted. You can be denied housing -- or your family evicted -- just based on an arrest.

The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

I say we haven't ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.

I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color -- and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

Although crack cocaine had not yet hit the streets when the War on Drugs was declared in 1982, its appearance a few years later created the perfect opportunity for the Reagan administration to build support for its new war. Drug use, once considered a private, public-health matter, was reframed through political rhetoric and media imagery as a grave threat to the national order.

By waging the drug war and getting tough almost exclusively in the 'hood, we've managed to create a vast new racial undercaste in an astonishingly short period of time.

We must build a movement for education, not incarceration. A movement for jobs, not jails. A movement that will end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison -- discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work, shelter and food.

'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'

Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says, 'I'm a criminal.' Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons.

In the 1990s -- the period of the greatest escalation of the drug war -- nearly 80 percent of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least, if not more, prevalent in middle class white neighborhoods and college campuses as it is in the 'hood.

Colorblindness, though widely touted as the solution, is actually the problem.

We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it's our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we've left behind.

I think it's important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled.

If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration--if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America--we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.

Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.

When people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you're given lectures about how it's really all your fault and that no one needs to make amends, you can lose your mind.

In the 'era of colorblindness,' there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we, as a nation, have 'moved beyond' race.