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There is one absolute commonality amongst the victims of human trafficking; the loss of personal freedom.
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Asa Don Brown
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Fact: Despite the creation in 2003 of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, to tackle human trafficking and related crimes, a 2006 UNICEF report showed that approximately 15 million children under the age of 14, mostly girls, were working across Nigeria.
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Abi Daré (The Girl with the Louding Voice)
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Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in his strong arms and say that he’d never meant to leave, that he hadn’t meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who’d ever trafficked with the peacekeepers. A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better.
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Paolo Bacigalupi (The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker, #2))
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A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.39 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Who you are as a person has a lot to do with who you are as meat
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Scott Carney (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers)
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When Africans were kidnapped, trafficked en masse and brutally dragged in chains to work camps in the “New World,” called plantations, we hid our deities and rituals in stories of saints, angels, and legendary characters. Our deities included a powerful cadre of orishas, abosom, lwas, álúsí, spirits, and god/desses. From South Africa to Sudan, Brazil to Cuba to even Indigenous Australia, we chant their names: Yemaya, Mami Wata, Atete, Iset, and Ala.
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Abiola Abrams (African Goddess Initiation: Sacred Rituals for Self-Love, Prosperity, and Joy)
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The church must reckon with the reality that ever since black people were stolen from Africa and trafficked to this land, they have been dehumanized, abused, criminalized, incarcerated, exploited for profit, and governed in distinctively sinister ways. This oppression has been personal, institutional, systemic, and legislative. It has been authorized and sanctioned by our local, state, and federal government. As the church, do we have the wherewithal to confront the austere reality that our national economy has been subsidized by a criminal justice system that is, and has been, predicated on the exploitation of cheap labor extracted from poor, racially profiled people of color?
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Dominique DuBois Gilliard (Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores)
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The Sacklers took the view that the same should go for OxyContin. To the degree that people are misusing the drug and overdosing, the blame lies with any number of potentially irresponsible parties—the prescribing doctor, the wholesaler, the pharmacist, the trafficker, the abuser, the addicted person—but not with the manufacturer. Not with Purdue. Much less the Sacklers.
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Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
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Ironically, years after publishing my first book, I’d receive an email criticizing me for portraying Korean camptown women as having been prostitutes “by choice.” The person had come to this conclusion because I hadn’t simply portrayed them as “forced.” In my reply, I countered that I would never use that term—“by choice”—because the idea of choice was far too troubled in the context I was writing about. When sex work is sponsored by the state to service a foreign military (the most powerful military in the world), when the relationship between the two countries is profoundly unequal, then the working conditions are already rooted in a place of coercion. It was true that many of the women who were sex workers for the US military were not tricked or trafficked, but neither did they have other good options. I had written that, despite how limited one’s choices are, there is always possibility for resistance. Maybe some of the women had embraced their roles as “bad girls”—a “fuck you” to patriarchal expectations of wifedom and motherhood—or maybe some had seized an opportunity to get closer to America. Working in the camptowns was the most likely path there for young Korean women in the 1960s. Even sex work for sheer survival is a way of defying a power structure that might otherwise leave you for dead. Survival is an act of resistance, but performing an act of resistance within an imperialistic order is not the same thing as “being a prostitute by choice.” Forced or free is a false dichotomy.
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Grace M. Cho (Tastes Like War: A Memoir)
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Some of my friends in concerned and committed activist organizations think that psychological analysis is actually the enemy of finding solutions. They think anyone with deep interest in psychology must be a total “navel gazer,” trying more to get away from the world's problems than to solve them. Some of these people believe that the world's problems would disappear if they could just translate all religious categories into Marxist terms and get everyone to be socialists. They assume, for example, that Marxists would never engage in cocaine trafficking, that a Marxist country would never have to shoot its generals for smuggling in cocaine, and that Marxists would never execute people who were longing for freedom. Did you know that? We would not have to execute students, or shoot them in the streets, if we were Marxists. You can go on and on with that, and it makes me sick, because it shows such an incredible naiveté about the realities of life. They need to read Reinhold Niebuhr's classic works on the dynamics of human pride that afflict all ideologies left and right (Niebuhr 1941–1943). The human predicament does not result from having the wrong ideology.
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Robert L. Moore (Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity)
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The UN has protocols on both 'smuggling people' and on 'trafficking in persons.' At meetings to discuss these laws, it became clear that 'trafficking' was the term used to discuss women and children, while 'smuggling' was used to refer to men.
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Melissa Ditmore, Juhu Thukral
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Many people fear that decriminalization and the controlled dispensing of drugs will lead to widespread substance use among people who are now deterred from becoming addicts only by existing legal prohibitions. Like other tenets of the War on Drugs, this view entirely lacks supporting evidence.
Any data on the subject points to the opposite prediction. For example, for many decades in the United Kingdom, heroin has been dispensed, under legal supervision, to addicts. The same type of program has been offered on a limited basis in other countries as well, and nowhere has it been found that this measure served in any way to entice unaddicted people into addiction. That is not surprising, given that addiction is a response to life experience, not simply to a drug.
People who do not suffer the searing emotional pain that drives hardcore drug addiction will rarely fall into dependency on chemicals, even if these were more readily available — and, once more, public access to habit-forming substances is not being proposed. The call for the decriminalization of drugs for personal use does not imply legal acceptance of drug dealing. Criminalization and prevention are not identical — if anything, the first undermines the other.
Paradoxical though it may seem, current drug laws against possession make drugs more readily available to potential new users than decriminalization would. Only the War on Drugs creates the raison d’être of the international trafficking industry, most of whose wealth is based on satisfying the cravings of established drug addicts. Without the exorbitant profits yielded by supplying to addicted users desperate for their substances, the illegal market would shrink to a fragment of its present size.
Further, much of the street-level front-line sales force of the illicit drug trade consists of users raising money to support their habit. With the decriminalization of possession for personal use and the medically supervised distribution of drugs, the incentive to sell to new “customers,” including young kids, would largely evaporate. Policing resources could then be concentrated on the remaining large-scale traffickers — if any.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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When you believe, when you know that you have received God's mercy, you must trust Him to help you live a new life. The old gods and spirits of your ancestors must be set aside. Those old superstitions won't help you. You must become a new person, Arthit. Trust in the Creator to forgive you.
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D.I. Telbat (HIDDEN HUMANITY: A Trafficking Rescue Novel (Never Lost Series Book 1))
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For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.
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Jeff Horwitz (Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets)
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McCloskey was personally responsible for the conversion of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, several congressmen, and high-profile political pundits such as Robert Novak and Larry Kudlow.
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Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
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To Del Portillo’s horror, the bishops had refused to back down in their assertion that personal prelatures—in accordance with the original thinking behind their creation at the Second Vatican Council—were to be made up only of priests.
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Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
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And then there’s Stella. Stella is an interior decorator who’s been in the business for more than a decade. She had a thriving design firm and accolades out the wazoo. And yet, she still felt a niggling need to go to school to get certified. “Why would you want to waste your time doing that?” I asked. “You have a waiting list for your clients.” “Well, I’d feel more legit,” she said. FOR BUSINESS For the love of God and the information highway, please write your bio in first person—we all know you wrote it anyway. One of the most highly trafficked pages on small business websites is the “About” page. People are hiring you, paying attention to you, coming to see you. So they want to hear from… you. “You made more than a hundred grand last year and your clients refer you all the time. Isn’t that legit?” I asked. She was resisting, so I ramped up my persisting. “You know what you should say in your bio?” I said to her. “Say that you’re self-taught, in eighteen-point bold type. Let people know that you never set foot in a design college because you were too busy sewing your own drapes, shopping for textiles with your grandma, and learning how to build cabinets after school with your dad. It’s in your blood. Self-taught says ‘extra amazing.’ Self-taught says ‘natural talent.’ Just come out with it.” She skipped school.
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Danielle LaPorte (The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms)
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Padma shook her head and sighed loudly. Her friend was foolish to think evil would simply disappear and leave them alone. “There is talk of a syndicate rising up. They are not happy with what you have set up here.” “Of course they’re not. But that’s just too bad.” Charlie sat across from her and frowned. “Before I was abducted, I was aware of poverty in the general sense, but the personal stories of bondage are so real and so heart wrenching.” “Charlie, please, you need to focus on the matter at hand,” Padma urged. “But don’t you see, it’s all connected. More than thirty million people are in some form of slavery worldwide. Thirty million!” Drumming her fingers on the desk, Charlie gave a weak smile. “I cannot stand by and do nothing. India has my heart and sadly it is one of the worst countries for human trafficking. You and I can attest to that.
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Tracey Hoffmann (Eli (Valley of Chaya #2))
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This process is an update of the archetypal shamanic journey and his or her ongoing role for the tribe: seeking out these beings, trafficking with them for personal or tribal gain and generally just avoiding their ire.
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Gordon White (Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments)
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A cult of personality was being built around him, cultivated and encouraged by the man himself.
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Gareth Gore (Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church)
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Instead of the vulnerable person (who has now disappeared), the illusion of the invulnerable person is created - the person who, by definition, cannot become a victim. No one - not women, drug abusers, people subjected to human trafficking, people living in poverty, illegal immigrants, or even children with no other option but to dig in the trash for food - can be called 'subjugated.' The ideal of the superman/superwoman becomes the natural condition of the human. For whatever this invulnerable person's fate - to be screwed by multiple men per day, take drugs and contract HIV/AIDs at ten years of age, have her body covered in bruises, lie passively and let herself be used, or turn other children into slaves - she is, by definition, an active subject who exercises opposition and control. The only possible violence that can be exerted against her is by calling her a victim. It is worse than any other physical or psychological violation to speak of her as subjugated - only then does she become a victim.
A consequence of this belief system is the conviction that if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators. The unmentionables, the men, are completely exonerated in a highly convenient, imperceptible way.
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Kajsa Ekis Ekman (Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self)
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Psychiatry, as a guild, has made a strong effort to legitimize itself through this lens and “make material” the mind and emotions. The problem is that perceived pathology has been reduced to the localized effects of neurochemicals, which act in a vacuum in the brain. Psychiatrists regard troublesome emotions as emerging from inborn errors of neurochemical trafficking, with a reductionist focus on the neurotransmitter serotonin. The mind as enemy, pumping out mood- and anxiety-producing thoughts like a ticker tape. This view holds no consideration for the interconnectedness of immune cells and endocrine glands throughout the body or the microorganisms in, among, and around us, let alone the emerging science of quantum biology and the role of energy in our manifest experience of being.5 Neither is there regard for the role of human emotion and its expression as an articulation of bodily imbalance, or personal suffering as a precursor for growth.
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Kelly Brogan (Own Your Self: The Surprising Path beyond Depression, Anxiety, and Fatigue to Reclaiming Your Authenticity, Vitality, and Freedom)
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I must say, I personally find it difficult to stomach this story of hardened sex traffickers releasing a young woman because she had a bad knee. I think men of that stripe are usually preoccupied with other parts of the anatomy.
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Joseph Knox (True Crime Story)
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A Trafficker is the most reliable person you will ever meet!
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Heidi Chance
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Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas...
In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened.
During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked).
Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.
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Paul Theroux
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I am sick and tired of hearing, the universe knows best. If the universe knew best, no child would cry of hunger. If the universe knew best, no young girl would fall victim to human trafficking. If the universe knew best, nobody would have to struggle till death to feed their family. If the universe knew best, not a single person would ever become a refugee. If the universe knew best, not a single human being would have to suffer on the face of earth. Any universe or god that allows for such horrors to teach humanity lessons or whatever, got to be extremely sick. Insects from the sewers deserve more respect than such sick forces.
The reason these horrors take place is that, contrary to all cowardly beliefs, there is no higher force concerned with human welfare. If we want these horrors to end, we gotta take the initiative to end them ourselves, without relying on prehistoric fairytales. So, stop all that supernatural nonsense, and take some responsibility for the world you live in. Stop delegating your human duties to a fictitious force and stand civilized wielding your backbone for a change.
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Abhijit Naskar (Her Insan Ailem: Everyone is Family, Everywhere is Home)
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It wasn’t personal because none of his ancestors had been trafficked as slaves, so gray eyes and light skin were simply an advantage in his mind, not a reminder that many ancestors were raped or bred like animals. Tonye was a pragmatist and a realist, not a historian or psychologist;
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Vanessa Walters (The Nigerwife)
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It's hard to explain to Tiana that her feelings about this aren't indicative of what a great guy her 'daddy' is but rather an indictment against how awful all the adults in her life have been...If you haven't had proper love and care, then a substitute will feel like the real thing, because you've got nothing to compare it to. For Tiana, whose entire fifteen years on the earth have been filled with physical violence, neglect, and horrific abuse, this analogy doesn't really make sense. Her 'daddy' is the first person who's shown her any type of kindness, who's modeled what a 'real' family looks like- even though after dinner he takes her and the other girls out and sells them on the street.
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Rachel Lloyd (Girls Like Us)
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The elites schooled their scions in private academies; everyone else taught their children whatever they could when they weren’t putting them to work or, worse, auctioning them off into indentured servitude or sentient trafficking. All in the name of freedom, of course. To the Orions, this was personal liberty. It all sounded like a sick joke to Graniv. How could someone be free when the society in which they lived had been rigged against them decades before they were even born? Who could ever hope to excel to a degree that would let them escape such institutionalized squalor? When she looked at Orion society as an outsider, all she saw was greed masquerading as virtue, selfishness venerated as courage.
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David Mack (Section 31: Control (Star Trek: Section 31))
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A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups.37 These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black. There
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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In 1996, when serving as Alabama’s attorney general, he promoted H.B. 242, S.B. 291, a state bill to establish mandatory death sentences for a second drug trafficking conviction, including for dealing marijuana
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Guy Fawkes (101 Indisputable Facts Proving Donald Trump Is An Idiot: A brief background of the most spectacularly unqualified person to ever occupy the White House.)
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I don't know if they ever knew how uncomfortable it was to hear over and over again that my parents were bad people. Eventually, I could only draw the conclusion that bad people came from bad people, so I must be a bad person, too.
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Lockey Maisonneuve (A Girl Raised by Wolves: An inspiring memoir of one woman's journey through sex trafficking, cancer, murder and more.)
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But can one obtain a divorce here?" "Oh, no," said they. "We trafficked in them for a while, but we found that all persons who obtained divorces through our industry promptly thanked Heaven they were free at last. In the face of such ingratitude we gave over that profitless trade,
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James Branch Cabell (Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice)
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Broke into her strip club, tricked her bouncer and bartender, interrupted her sexual gymnastics with a couple of her dancers, threatened her with physical violence, tried to blackmail her for the information I needed, take your pick. In my defence, she's really not a very nice person, and she almost had me sold to human traffickers, so really, I'm in a morally neutral position, here.
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H.D.A. Roberts (The Magician's Brother (The Magician's Brother, #1))