I found this article particularly moving. Maybe you will too ...
Dismantling Racism Part, Pt 2: #WhatHappenedToSandraBland
by Lindsey Paris-Lopez, patheos.com -- July 20, 2015
She could have been my neighbor.
28-year-old Sandra Bland was on her way to changing the world. Outspoken in the Black Lives Matter movement, courageous and compassionate, she was on her way to claim a job she had earned at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, in student outreach. What should have been a joyful and celebratory time in her life ended in tragedy. Pulled over for allegedly failing to signal a lane change, she was accused of assaulting the officer who stopped her. Video footage shows her head being slammed into the ground before she was forced into the patrol car. Three days later, she was dead in her cell. Authorities claim it was suicide. Her friends and family beg to differ.
[...]
These vicious myths so blurred white vision that to this day we are unable to see our black brothers and sisters clearly. They eroded our souls just as surely as they destroyed black lives. [...] I realize all the ways in which de facto segregation undermined the Civil Rights movement, and realize that, even though it is now politically correct to claim racial blindness, the marginalization and stigmatization of black people over time has created hidden fears and prejudices in the white psyche.
And then I look at the greed of the prison industrial complex, and realize how easy it is for a nation that has never confronted its diabolical racial history to design a system of for-profit prisons reintroducing slave labor via prisoners, mostly African Americans disproportionately arrested and convicted. Our nation is still running on the marginalization, brutalization, and exploitation of African Americans. The 13th amendment still allows for slavery as punishment for a crime. But prison labor is just the tip of the iceberg. As Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report says, “black mass incarceration serves the vital purpose of morally justifying America’s viciously unequal and racist economic and social order.” By disenfranchising and stigmatizing prisoners and ex-prisoners, the incarceration system limits resources for many African American communities and blame the victims of a heartless economic system instead of the system itself. We could not get away with our bloated prison industrial complex and corrupt criminal injustice system without the persistent devaluation of black lives, and the persistent devaluation of black lives helps uphold our corrupt criminal injustice system.
[...]
Respectful "Valuations" should be basic to Human Rights, equally given to all.
Not, routinely denied to some.
And some blood-chilling stats from that last link, in the previous quote...
“With under 5 percent of the world’s people, the US accounts for 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners. More than half its 2.2 million prisoners come from the one eighth of its population which is black. Today, an astounding 3 percent of all African Americans languish in prisons and jails, and nearly as many more are on probation, parole, bail, house arrest or court supervision...
[...] Whether Republicans or Democrats are in office black mass incarceration serves the vital purpose of morally justifying America's viciously unequal and racist economic and social order. The prison state does this by creating mostly black and brown class of permanently stigmatized and “unworthy” poor who can be portrayed as not deserving decent housing, real educations, affordable health care, dignity or jobs at living wages and whose precarious lives and devastated communities can be blamed on anything except the failure of neoliberal capitalism to provide bread, education, housing dignity or justice.
[...]
Dignity
IS SHOULD BE a basic Human Right.
YET there are still some serious problems, in our multi-teired system of injustice,
That robs entire groups of people of that presumptive Dignity.
That robs them of their very Lives.
Simply, for changing lanes ...