Quotes About Inequality

median white household wealth (assets minus liabilities) is about $134,000, while median black household wealth is about $11,000—less than 10 percent as much. Not all of this enormous difference is attributable to the government's racial housing policy, but a good portion of it certainly is.

Indeed, the study confirmed that because African Americans were willing to pay more than whites for similar housing, property values in neighborhoods where African Americans could purchase increased more often than they declined.

It is obvious from a glance at the . . . transit plans that an attempt is being made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by . . . building highways that benefit white suburbanites, facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work and back.

The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.

In North Philadelphia in 1942, a priest spearheaded a campaign to prevent African Americans from living in the neighborhood. The same year a priest in a Polish American parish in Buffalo, New York, directed the campaign to deny public housing for African American war workers, stalling a proposed project for two years. Just south of the city, 600 units in the federally managed project for whites went vacant, while African American war workers could not find adequate housing.

This shifting of terminology should not distract us from this underlying truth: We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.

The existence of black ghettos is a visible reminder of our inequalities and history, a reminder whose implications are so uncomfortable that we find ways to avoid them.

One of the more important books on American race relations of the past decade or more is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, published in 2010.

ghetto to describe low-income African American neighborhoods, created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. No other term succinctly describes this combination of characteristics, so I use the term as well.†

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate

Parents' economic status is commonly replicated in the next generation, so once government prevented African Americans from fully participating in the mid-twentieth-century free labor market, depressed incomes became, for many, a multigenerational trait.

The value of white working- and middle-class families' suburban housing appreciated substantially over the years, resulting in vast wealth differences between whites and blacks that helped to define permanently our racial living arrangements. Because parents can bequeath assets to their children, the racial wealth gap is even more persistent down through the generations than income differences.

Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don't want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

More people in our world, in other words, have mobile phones than toothbrushes (which perhaps speaks as much about dental hygiene as 'pervasive computing').

Asian Americans, like Native Americans, are not evenly distributed across the United States. To lump these people together ignores the sharp differences between them. Any examination of Asian Americans quickly reveals their diversity, which will be apparent as we focus on individual Asian American groups, beginning with Asian Indians.

About one in 16 White males can expect to go to a state or federal prison during his lifetime, yet for Black males this lifetime probability is one out of three (Bureau of the Census 2010a:Tables 320, 346, 615; Gaines 2005).

Criminal Justice A complex, sensitive topic affecting African Americans is their role in criminal justice. It was reported in 2010 that Blacks constitute 4.7 percent of all lawyers, 14.1 percent of police officers, 14.9 percent of detectives, and 28.6 percent of security guards but 39 percent of jail inmates.

In the Northeast there was $77 in circulation per inhabitant. As late as 1880, the South had a quarter of the country's population but only 10 percent of its currency.

Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.

Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like living in jail.

The white folks like for us to be religious, then they can do what they want to with us.