Quotes About Inequality

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.

When a black man is stopped by a cop for no apparent reason, that is covert racism. When a black woman shops in a fancy store and is followed by security guards, that is covert racism. It is more subtle than 1960s racism, but it is still racism.

The fact is inner-city black districts are not the same as suburban Republican districts. That's a fact. And people need to go and learn about the whole country.

The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.

In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.

I came from the heart of the ghetto - there ain't no suburbia in me.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Brazil is a country that has rich people, as you have in New York City, as you have in Berlin or in London. But we also have poor people like in Bangladesh or in African suburbs.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

Red Hook is cut off from the rest of the borough by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and has no subway access, forcing residents to rely on the bus, their feet or, for those lucky enough to afford it, a car.

You want to close the income inequality gap in part? Give us better educated kids out of high school. Give us kids that can challenge and succeed in the challenge with technology. You give us those kinds of kids, and watch the needle move.

There should be a class on sex education, a real sex-education class. There should be a class on police brutality. There should be a class on apartheid. There should be a class on why people are hungry. But there are not. There are classes on gym. Physical education. Let's learn volleyball.

Niggers was the ones on the rope, hanging off the thing. Niggas is the ones with gold ropes,hanging out at clubs.

Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.

if they take half the buildings that they use to praise god and give it to the motherfuckers who need god we'd be 'aight

If they take half the buildings that they use to praise god and give it the motherfuckers who need god we'd be aight

I see the ground is the symbol for the poor people; the poor people is gonna open up this whole world and swallow up the rich people, 'cause the rich people gonna be so fat, they gonna be so appetizing, you know what I'm saying, wealthy, appetizing. The poor gonna be so poor and hungry, you know what I'm saying? It's gonna be like — there might be some cannibalism out this mother. They might eat the rich.

You know it's funny when it rains it pours. They got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.

How the Other Half Lives

That is one of the truths about American business that you are least likely to read about in a major media outlet: income inequality is mostly about the differences between the superstar companies and the others.

sound and fury of these "my culture is better than your culture" conflicts between male-dominated colonial governments and male-dominated Third-World nationalist movements often served to obscure the fact that women were clearly second-class citizens in all these cultural contexts.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this: If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Globalization is a strategy of liberalization that becomes an economic nightmare for the poor

Golf was once a rich man's sport, but now it has millions of poor players