I don't know what most white people in this country feel,

but I can only include what they feel from the state of their institutions.

Now, this is the evidence.

You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children, on some idealism which you assure me

in America, which I have never seen.

Welcome back to Black History for White People, a podcast where we educate, resource, and challenge

white people about black history.

I'm Brad, and on today's show are my co-host Katina and

Garan. Today's topic is mass incarceration. We hope you enjoy the discussion.

Okay, so we've heard about kind of an introduction into mass incarceration and now we're

going to start heading down the history path. So,

Garen, what do we need to know? Start us off. What's the history of mass incarceration?

So let's start out by reviewing some of the history going further back and looking at how

black people were viewed through time. So during slavery, there's this feature that we've talked about before where white people

who wanted to enslave and derive profits from black people, from black bodies, also wanted

to feel like good people at the same time.

We can probably relate to this today.

Most people want to feel like a good person, even when they're cheating or using cruelty to gain money,

we come up with ways to tell ourselves a story about ourselves that still leaves us as good people.

And so all throughout history, you see, the white community would come up with justifications for why the things they were doing were okay.

And so during antebellum slavery, one of the big justifications was the happy slave myth.

They had this idea that they promoted and kind of advertised.

...