CeCe McDonald’s incarceration and experiences with the justice system motivated her to become an activist on subjects of racism, trans liberation and mass incarceration.

McDonald, a transgendered woman of color, discussed the “unjust justice system” and issues of mass incarceration plaguing society in a lecture hosted by the International Socialist Organization and the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition on campus Thursday.

“This never ending cycle of negativity and dealing with society on a level that was already hard being a person of color and trans, only became harder [as] now I had to deal with being a felon and an ex-convict,” McDonald said.

In June 2011, McDonald, her boyfriend and some friends went to a grocery store and encountered a group of men who became hostile and expressed racist ideas, McDonald said. The encounter escalated and there was a physical altercation between the two groups, leaving one man dead, she said.

Upon the arrival of police, the concern was not on McDonald’s battered condition but instead turned into an interrogation, she said. After being taken to the hospital and treated for her injuries she was immediately transferred to an interrogation room and held in jail for 72 hours before the police decided to charge her with murder, McDonald said.

Unwilling to see the pain McDonald was suffering, McDonald said the police decided she was an evil person.

“The illegal, ‘unjustice’ system, is pretty much set up for the failure of people of color and marginalized bodies,” she said.

In jail, McDonald faced being hyper-sexualized and demeaned daily and she often shut herself up in her room alone all day. McDonald said the system uses its power and privilege to destroy the lives of marginalized people.

To McDonald it was not an issue of being a woman in a male jail, but it was about being in jail and the environment and atmosphere it creates.

“Whether I was in a male prison, a female prison or a zoo it is still oppression,” she said. “It is a place where people are confined and discriminated against and oppressed.”

McDonald said there is more to the people in prison than the simple stereotype that they are inherently bad. Something has caused these people to act out, but no one is born bad; they are a product of their environment, she said.

While in jail, McDonald self-educated herself with books like “The New Jim Crow” to learn about the realities of today’s justice system. These efforts lit a fire beneath McDonald as the community gave her the motivation to fight, she said.

“I needed to attack the system and let them know I wasn’t going to give in and wasn’t going to let them prove to me their ideas of people of color,” McDonald said. “I wanted to tell them I am not disposable.”

Uniting people towards new, progressive ways and moving towards the recognition that all lives matter is vastly important to McDonald.

To make progress, it is vital to move away from gender binaries, race and many other things that society has put into people’s minds, McDonald said.

“We have to decolonize our minds around what society has been placing in us as false history and ideas,” McDonald said. “These things have constructed our minds, we have internalized them.”