Race And Inequality Quotes & Sayings

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn't have to be another country. It can be the past instead - the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.
This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines? — Kurt Vonnegut

Is political and civil inequality just?
Some say yes; others no. To the first I would reply that, when the people abolished all privileges of birth and caste, they did it, in all probability, because it was for their advantage; why then do they favor the privileges of fortune more than those of rank and race? Because, say they, political inequality is a result of property; and without property society is impossible: thus the question just raised becomes a question of property. To the second I content myself with this remark: If you wish to enjoy political equality, abolish property; otherwise, why do you complain? — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The three topics of this book - technological change, education, and inequality - are intricately related in a kind of 'race.' During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the rising supply of educated workers outstripped the increased demand caused by technological advances. Higher real incomes were accompanied by lower inequality. But during the last two decades of the century the reverse was the case, and there was sharply rising inequality. Put another way, in the first half of the century, education raced ahead of technology, but later in the century, technology raced ahead of educational gains. The skill bias of technology did not change much across the century, nor did its rate of change. Rather, the sharp rise in inequality was largely due to an educational slowdown. — Claudia Goldin

Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don't want some poor Indian girl's hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don't make our own business? — Zadie Smith

I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don't have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we're doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality. — Michael Emerson

The Court ... [recognizes] ... the persistence of racial inequality and a majority's acknowledgement of Congress's authority to act affirmatively, not only to end discrimination, but also to counteract discrimination's lingering effects. Those effects, reflective of a system of racial caste [legal segregation and discrimination] only recently ended, are evident in our work places, markets, and neighborhoods. Job applicants with identical resumes, qualifications, and interview styles still experience different receptions, depending on their race. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race. — Andrew Carnegie

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation
and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. — Cornel West

The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56 — Christopher L. Hayes

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one! — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet. — Samantha Trenoweth

The first commendment of hte post 1970s meritocracy can be sumed up as follows: "Thou shall provide equality of opportunity to all, regardless of race, gender, or sexual oritentation, but worry not about equality of outcomes." But what we've seen time and time again is that the two aren't so neatly separated. If you don't concern yourself at all with equality fo outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish. — Christopher L. Hayes

68. In A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Wilder writes, "The ghetto is not so much a place as it is a relationship - the physical manifestation of a perverse imbalance in social power. The ghetto is not the cause of social pathology, it is its destination. It is not the set of ever-changing, ever-negotiated disparities that dominate it but the financial, physical, and legal coercion that give rise to them. It cannot be defined by the people who occupy it but by the struggles that place them there. It is not social inequality but the attempt to predetermine the burden of social inequality. Thus, ghettos are different sizes, have different demographics, and suffer different conditions. They have in common only the lack of power that allows their residents to be physically concentrated and socially targeted" (p. 234). — Mark R. Gornik

Early biologists were the social scientists of their times, because their racial descriptions of the human species contain explicit behavioral correlations. Racial attributes were cited to explain social conditions, which then became a natural state of affairs. In the process of their construction, races are deemed part of nature; they are alleged to have been "discovered," not constructed by an emphasis on particular anatomical attributes. This assumption of the naturalness of race is connected with the pursuit of an explanation of a particular social condition - inequality. Races, as unequal biological entities, must be said to have their peculiar cultures, psychologies, and unequal economic circumstances. — Yehudi O. Webster

This leads to the idea of a race between education and technology: if the supply of skills does not increase at the same pace as the needs of technology, then groups whose training is not sufficiently advanced will earn less and be relegated to devalued lines of work, and inequality with respect to labor will increase. In order to avoid this, the educational system must increase its supply of new types of training and its output of new skills at a sufficiently rapid pace. If equality is to decrease, moreover, the supply of new skills must increase even more rapidly, especially for the least well educated. — Thomas Piketty

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments. — Tim Wise

Whether focused on ancestry, visible race, or combinations of the two, systems of ranked difference aimed to separate people into hierarchies of inequality while incorporating them in colonial production, justifying exploitations with claims of essential difference. — John Tutino

Whiteness has been, above all, a racial formation that presupposed and reproduced relations of inequality and domination between "whites" and their racial others. — Moon-kie Jung

We have now come to a quite insidious edge in contemporary tolerance discourse. By converting the effects of inequality - for example, institutionalized racism - into a matter of "different practices and beliefs," this discourse masks the working of inequality and hegemonic culture as that which produces the differences it seeks to protect. As it essentializes difference and reifies sexuality, race, and ethnicity at the level of ideas and practices, contemporary tolerance discourse covers over the workings of power and the importance of history in producing the differences called sexuality, race, and ethnicity. It casts those culturally produced differences as innate or given, as matters of nature that divide the human species rather than as sites of inequality or domination. — Wendy Brown

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The worst form of inequality, is the inequality of ideals A people united by the same ideal, irrespective of religion, social status, race, political preference or sexual, would have the strength to fight for a fairer country. — Marcela Re Ribeiro

The real debate about both the horrific inequality in the world and about the terrorism and frightening instability in the world requires analysis of the differences in upset-adaption or alienation-from-soul between individuals, races, genders, generations, countries, civilisations and cultures, but until the human condition could be explained and the upset state of the human condition compassionately understood and thus defended that debate could not take place. — Jeremy Griffith

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together. — Beryl Markham

I believe our education system as a whole has not integrated the histories of all people into our education system, just the Eurocentric view of itself, and the White-centered view of African Americans, and even this is slim to nonexistent. What I find is that most people don't know the fact they don't know, because of the complete lack of information. — Ronald Takaki