The criminal justice system has a set of rights created to protect you. But do you think it’s really protecting us? You had a right to remain silent, but that really means you had a right to be silenced, doubted, interrogated, suspected. The color of your skin can and will be used against you in a court of law. In their hands, we’re incarcerated five times more often than white people convicted for the same crimes. You have a right to an attorney during questioning. And in some states, 80 percent of criminal defendants can’t even afford a attorney, so an overworked public defender controls your fate — one government employee, countless lives at stake. You had a right to be innocent until proven guilty. But somehow, about 47 percent of the wrongly convicted are black. And if they do prove you’re guilty, they’re going to write you a run-on sentence, on average 20 percent longer than white defendants accused of the same crime. Even if you get out, you’re still not free. When you’re an ex-con, they had a right to deny you a bank account, deny you a mortgage, deny you a job, deny your vote. And if you don’t remain perfect, with the smallest slip-up, smallest infraction, the most honest mistake, you’re going to join us, the 80 percent who come back to prison within five years, as I did. That’s when you realize, they didn’t bring us here to thrive. They brought us here to build this. The plantation and a prison are actually no different. The past is the present. It ain’t no coincidence. This was the plan since abolition, to keep us subjugated by creating this system. But I believe in a different set of rights, the right to stand up and be heard, the right to reform a broken justice system and build a new future. We had the right to be silent. Now it’s our right to speak up. Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?