Politics & Power Quote by Danny Glover

Glover’s power move here is refusing the comfort of the “bad economy” alibi. By anchoring the claim to “since 1957,” he’s not just citing a grim statistic; he’s indicting a system that stays reliably unequal regardless of who’s in office or whether Wall Street is up. “In good times and bad times” is the key phrase: it strips away the idea that disparity is an unfortunate side-effect of recessions and reframes it as a design feature of American prosperity.

Then he pivots from the labor market to the carceral state, drawing an implied pipeline without spelling it out. The subtext is blunt: when work is structurally scarce, the state’s most consistent jobs program becomes policing, prosecution, and confinement. Mentioning death row is a rhetorical escalation, not a detour. It forces the listener to confront not only mass incarceration, but the ultimate, irreversible expression of state power. The numbers do the moral work; he doesn’t need to sermonize.

As an actor-activist speaking in the late 20th-century/early 2000s political climate, Glover is operating against a mainstream narrative that treated racial inequality as either solved (civil rights “won”) or individualized (“personal responsibility”). He uses statistics as cultural counter-programming: a way to puncture feel-good progress stories and re-center racism as policy, not prejudice. The intent isn’t merely to inform; it’s to make denial socially untenable.