“The undisputed historical backdrop fro racial profiling is two hundred and forty years of chattel slavery, a hundred years of Jim Crow, and four-hundred-plus years of intergenerational wealth transfer during which most of the time black people not only owned little property but were property. In roughly fifty of the first seventy-two years of our country’s first century, the presidents of the United States themselves owned slaves. In the infamous Dred Scott case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that a black man had no rights that a white man need respect, five of the justices were from slaveholding families.

This history may not seem long ago, but it has left its thumbprint on our unconscious mental processes.” -Lani Guinier