Quotes About Inequality

There is no equal to poor white trash when they get their hands on a Bible.

existed in inverse proportion to the defenselessness of the working people they exploited and injured.

If you're poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you're educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.

Jennifer, some people is suppose' to have only what other people let them have.' Lord God, her age and white and believing somet'ing like that.

They see what they need to see. Black folk cain't be choicy. They see what they gots to see.

Joe Molinari's role in life had been being used by others, as consumer and laborer and voter and minion, which, in the economics of the world I grew up in, was considered normal by both the liege lord in the manor and the serf in the field.

past Louis Armstrong Park, a place no white person in his right mind enters either day or night

You hate rich people, Dave.

Although the working poor of New York would explode into the worst riot of American history in 1863

the slaves in the seven cotton states of the lower South had received in the form of food, clothing, and shelter only 22 percent of the income produced by the plantations and farms on which they worked.

I had thoroughly been a girl so long by then that I'd grown to like it, got used to it, got used to not having to lift things, and have folks make excuses for me on account of me not being strong enough, or fast enough, or powerful enough like a boy, on account of my size. But that's the thing. You can play one part in life, but you can't be that thing. You just playing it. You're not real.

Being a Negro's a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don't matter. You just a Negro to the world.

Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is," she said flatly. "Danger here. Danger there. We don't need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don't need you to say what the world is to us.

and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man's dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.

They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their "I was raised with nuthin' and went to Harvard anyway" experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream.

It made me a bit sad, truth be to tell it, to watch them hundreds of white folks crying for the Negro, for there weren't hardly ever any Negroes present at most of them gatherings, and them that was there was doodied up and quiet as a mouse. It seemed to me the whole business of the Negro's life out there weren't no different than it was out west, to my mind. It was like a big, long lynching. Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don't know your wants. He don't know your needs or feelings or what's inside you, for you ain't equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse.

Slavery done made a fool out of a lot of folks. Twisted 'em all different kinds of ways. I seen it happen many a time in my day. I expect it'll happen in all our tomorrows, too, for when you slave a person, you slave the one in front and the one behind.

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors its worst members.

It sucked, but it was way cool at the same time, Gazzy said. I felt like the Blue Angels! Yeah, except the blue Angels are an extremely well funded, well equipped, well trained, well fed, and no doubt squeaky-clean group of crack navy pilots, I said. And we're a bunch of unfunded, unequipped, semitrained, not nearly well fed enough, and filthy mongrel avian-human hybrids. But other than that, it's exactly the same.

My parents were just carried out of the building in the service elevator, he shouted at the cops. They were vile, but they didn't deserve to be taken out with the trash!

The case of Cecily Chandler is a perfect example of how privileged people get over on the system," the young man said. "Harry Chandler had a famous defense attorney for a lawyer, a slick talker who probably played tennis with the judge.

Disproportionate.