Quotes About Inequality

The victims of highway building tended to be overwhelmingly poor and black.

Inner-city slums could be cleared, blacks removed to more distant second-ghetto areas, central business districts redeveloped, and transportation woes solved all at the same time — and mostly at federal expense.

The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kind of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind.

what right [do] people in wealthy countries have to blame the poor for their poverty, much less for humanity's environmental dilemma, when it [is] rich countries' consumption patterns that [are] responsible for the vast majority of the world's resource depletion and ecosystem destruction?

Marie Antoinette is said to have dismissed the plight of the poor by declaring, "Let them eat cake." But there's no evidence the queen ever said it, and plenty of evidence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau did. His autobiographical book, "Confessions," included the phrase about 1767, before Marie Antoinette even got to France. The quote in the original French refers to brioche, which is not really a cake and is better described as an enriched bread roll.

If all poor people refused to fight, he argued, the rich would have no army and there would be no war.

Everyone marveled--between courses at The Palm--at how out of touch Mittens was.

To grasp the significance of these numbers, we should note that for most disadvantaged groups today "the criminal justice system increasingly is the main provider of health care, substance abuse treatment, mental health services, job training, education, and other critical social and economic supports. . . ."[31]

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the "school-to-prison pipeline" that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America's racialized poor, and then "tracks" them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

In the mid-1990s, New York City was spending $58,000 annually per adult inmate and $70,000 for each juvenile at Rikers.[6] In 2013, the annual cost per inmate was $167,000.[7] Over the last two decades this amounts to eight to ten times what the city spends on each child in its public schools.

Moreover, in private prisons people of color are even more overrepresented than they are in federal and state prison populations. This is because private prisons contract to avoid housing the more costly elderly prisoner. They prefer the younger bodies, and so they hold more of the youth of color, the bulk of these coming in as targets of the recent "war on drugs.

Although African Americans are usually no more than 13 percent of the U.S. population, 40 percent of state death row populations are African American. In some states, like Pennsylvania, 60 percent of the death row population is African American. On federal death row, over 60 percent are from communities of color.

As French novelist and essayist Jean Genet once wrote about prison, "it is in this place that racism reaches its cruelest pitch . . . in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism.

An economic order rooted in a system of production that tolerates and depends upon hierarches of class and race will have to devise systems of control and punishment to deal with social dynamite. This need to control yields the kind of policing, imprisoning, and executing we see today in the political theatrics of state terror, both to move aside those seen as "social junk," and to remove and "neutralize" those seen as "social dynamite.

The death penalty is almost universally a punishment for the poor, for those without the money to get competent counsel. The adage remains true about the death penalty: "Those without the capital get the punishment.

Structural racism works—if I could summarize all too briefly—by stereotyping peoples and then routinizing socially experienced outcomes that are violent and destructive, often exposing members of racially-marked groups to slow or sudden death.

To live protected within any version of a gated community diminishes me; it is an affront to my dignity as a person. It is to live as a parasite, and so clothes my everyday living in structural violence.

I include as "economically elite" not just the fraction of the one-percent who control the nation's financial portfolio, as it were, those who have the largest incomes and economic power. I include within the culture of the economic elite those other groups who live dependent upon, or in proximity to, this largely white overclass.

To understand prisons as racially structured, consider, first, how the racialized make-up of the prison population is usually described. Writers often deploy a kind of shorthand here, stating the prisons are made up of over 60 percent or more prisoners of color.[80] At one point that figure was as high as 70 percent for "'minorities,"' or 'people of color'.

The problems I write of in this section do not focus on only violent practices inside correctional facilities, detention centers, or federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Just as importantly, these internal dynamics are significant because they express and reinforce sexual inequality and gender injustice in the larger society.

Even the rising number of poor whites being swept into prison by corporate dispossession and profiteering today are often "blackened," in the sense of being marked in the eyes of the larger society as "transgressive" and in some of the ways often meted out to persons of color. In

White youth also often receive extensive assistance as well as tolerance when they develop drug problems. In contrast, blacks, Latinos/as, and Arab- and Southeast Asian-Americans among the stigmatized poor are without such counseling services and often simply hustled off to jail. It

It is cynical, often hypocritical, and self-defeating to declare all drug offenders violent and then withdraw from them, especially from the poor among them, the resources needed to redress the problems that create drug use.

In short, for supplying and controlling both natural resources (oil) essential for U.S. economic life, and also for nurturing U.S. group identity, the deaths of the poor are necessary. They are sacrifices that power the U.S.-led imperium.