Quotes About Inequality

The distance between the haves and the have-nots is a train ride.

I loved him more than he loved me, and that is a bad place for a woman to be.

The haves are the haves until they have not." Now, Savattini understood the riddle.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

Yet sometimes it seems the world is more moved by the death of one white priest than by the passing of hundreds, thousands, of Hawaiians. Everyone knows Damien's name now, but will anyone remember these girls, other than you and me?

What does fighting crime mean, exactly? Does it mean upholding the law when a woman shoplifts to feed her children, or does it mean struggling to uncover the ones who, quite legally, have brought about her poverty?

Children starve while boots costing many thousands of dollars leave their mark upon the surface of the moon. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.

Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.

It was always a bad sign when better-off types drew comparisons between unsightly ghetto populations and some animal or other, most especially those species that we had, reluctantly, to poison periodically. Why didn't people keep their lame excuses to themselves? Mick

Odiar a los chatarros es natural... Le roban el trabajo a la gente, apestan a aceite. Yo creo que los tíos de Una Carne aciertan de pleno...

All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg.

They say that higher wages will cause the mines to close down. Then what is it worth, this mining industry? And why should it be kept alive, if it is only our poverty that keeps it alive? They say it makes the country rich, but what do we see of these riches? Is it we that must be kept poor so that others may stay rich?

Cultural products will spread faster and wider when everybody can see what everybody else is doing. It suggests that the future of many hit-making markets will be fully open, radically transparent, and very, very unequal.

A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.

Today, little has changed. Many poorer whites oppose social reform as "welfare programs for blacks" although, ironically, they have employment, education, and social service needs that differ from those of poor blacks by a margin that, without a racial scorecard, is difficult to measure. Interest

Du Bois reminds us that, to compensate their low wages, segregation gave whites a "public and psychological wage." As whites, they were admitted freely to public functions and parks, the police were drawn from their ranks, and they could elect local leaders who treated them well. David Roediger adds that status and privileges "could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships, North and South.

time proved that the persistent educational gap between black and white students was only indirectly traceable to segregation. Instead, the root of the problem appeared to be the substantial disparities in the resources provided to black students relative to white students. Many, including myself, decided that given the difficulty of integrating black and Latino students with their swiftly fleeing white counterparts, we should concentrate on desegregating the money.

This renewed politics of otherness not only allowed entire categories of poor whites to develop a powerful sense of racial belonging, but also allowed entire categories of erstwhile nonwhite immigrants (the Irish are the most prominent example) to become white.

Brown is the definitive example of the fate of civil rights policies that were sought with too little regard for either the variables of racial fortuity or the tremendous obstacles those we hoped to help were actually facing in their lives.

We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained.

Success for the black person requires effective functioning achieved with the knowledge that his or her work will not be recognized or rewarded to the same degree as a white person doing the same thing.

a system of domination will always be undernourished.

We have been taught, in ways large and small, religious and secular, that life is based on hierarchies, and that those higher on these hierarchies dominate those lower, either by right or by might. We have been taught that there are myriad literal and metaphorical food chains where the one at the top is the king of the jungle.

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.