Derecka Purnell Quotes

That's what law school allowed me to have - was time to actually read abolitionist literature - you know, read "Abolition Democracy" by Angela Davis, read her other book "Are Prisons Obsolete?" - the more time I had to study, you know, works from, like, Naomi Murakawa. I mean, I just had so much time to start learning the history of police, the function of police, how this word crime is a social construct, how there's so much sexual violence in this world - in this country, in particular - and it's not all reducible to what to do with a rapist - right? - because most people who commit sexual violence will never see a day in prison. And so police and prisons are currently inadequate responses to the sexual violence that we have right now. They're currently inadequate responses to the homicides that we have right now - right? - the harms of our nightmares. You look across the country - the police clearance rate for murders is something like 40-50%, which means that 40-50% of people accused of murdering someone are just arrested and charged - not even convicted, right?

Every year, someone from my high school gets killed from gun violence. It's one of the scariest statistics that I live with on a daily basis. Like, who is it going to be this year?

it's going to class, learning about other kinds of Christians, learning about James Cone and Howard Thurman, reading texts like "Jesus And The Disinherited," that teaches that God is on the side of the oppressed, meeting other kinds of Christians who are making sense of their faith through justice and - right? And so it's - I was so grateful to be to be pushed to think about these ideas through, you know, the Children's Defense Fund and Marian Wright Edelman and their invocation of Ella Baker and Martin Luther King. And so now I see myself in the tradition of people of faith who are much more like them and less like, you know, the people who I found myself finding refuge with early on.

I envy the students who were called bad students, who chose not to run during the flight-and-fury time in between classes, who just walked very slowly in defiance of the entire system because they knew that it was wrong. And I was like, oh, man, these students - like, they're going to always get in-school suspension. But they were subtly critiquing the system itself. And I wish I had been more understanding of that when I was younger, instead of judgmental.

why do we have to run from cops in our neighborhood and then go to school and run from, quote, "school resource officers," unquote, in order to learn, in order to get an education?...I watched that from sixth grade all the way until I graduated high school.

we called 911 because it was often the default response to a lot of harm that we were facing in our homes, in our families when fights broke out, when someone needed medical assistance. It was the only resource, and so it became the default resource. There were no clinics in my neighborhood, no grocery stores. The last grocery store in that neighborhood closed down in the year 2000. There hasn't been a fresh food source since, right? And so there were all these unhealthy, toxic pieces of our environment that made us sick that - there were stressors that made us fight. So 911 became the go-to response to solve a lot of these crises that could have been prevented.