"You're also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They're an interesting bunch. They're so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed by them by the wider whiteness. It starts before birth and carries on after you're dead. And what whiteness gives you, it can take away. You don't understand that, I bet, but you are only white by courtesy, Mr. Eagle, and you are really only a little green man clothed in whiteness. You won't believe how quickly you can be dewhitened. You're the original illegal alien."

[...] Bruce was one of the richest men who'd ever lived, a contractor on both the white and black sides of the Pentagon's budget, with clearances to match the Joint Chiefs. He owned his own covert armor, and an overt armory, and corporations he had majority stakes in provided intelligence contracting to the entire roster of federal espionage and policing agencies, not to mention most major metros' police forces. He almost certainly got a paycheck every time the cops in Staten Island were advised by a machine-learning algorithm to go to the brown side of the Mason-Dixon line and starting making Black people turn out their pockets and drop their pants.

[...] The Eagle called several of his State Department contacts that night, hoping one of them would find a channel to the prosecutors on Robinson's case. It pained him to do it, because he wanted the system to just be right, not to make an exception. [...]

"[...] All the data they feed this system to predict crime comes from the cops, who are assumed to have some kind of bias, first because they're human and all humans have bias, and second because NYPD has a long history of getting caught in racial discrimination, which is why they're buying this stuff in the first place.

"Because cops only find crime where they look for it. If you make every Black person you see turn out their pockets, you will find every knife and every dime-baggie that any Black person carries, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether Black people are especially prone to carrying knives or drugs, especially when cops make quota by carrying around a little something to plant if need be.

[...] "If I could explain one thing to the American Eagle, it would be that: he should be hanging city officials by their ankles out of their office windows until they can explain how this fucked-up, ridiculous situation came to pass on their watch. Then he can move on to the police union. Then the software developers. I understand how a guy like that can end up feeling like he's just tinkering in the margins of the problem and wants to draw a line in the sand, but drawing it in front of Wilbur Robinson is a no-win situation."

"For that son-of-a-bitch to be doing what he's doing, there have to be a lot of people in on it: the DA, the judge, his commanding officer, the other cops in the cruiser with him. Bianchi isn't any rotten apple, he's a prototype, Mr. Eagle, the very model of a modern major bushwhacker, and you can tell because very time he did it, he got promoted. He's how things are supposed to work, so you'll forgive me if I'm just not all that interested in how you feel about the injustice of seeing me lying out on the ground while Sergeant Bianchi and his pals beat me nearly to death for no reason at all."

Watching these devices get wheeled into position for use on New Yorkers did something to the American Eagle [...] He'd seen New Yorkers scared, brave, defiant, beaten, noble, and cowardly, and he'd never once wondered which side he was on. Now he had to choose a side between New York and New Yorkers.