Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes

'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.

Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

South Africa is labouring to find its revolutionary path; the colours of the Rainbow Nation have difficulty blending together; the wealthy elites (white, black or Indian) profit from de facto segregation.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

African-Americans are underrepresented.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

Segregation by race has declined gradually since 1970, but separation by income has grown steadily in the same period.

England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbot, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England; nor is there any hope for an end of this misery.

Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in our schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the State legislature.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …

We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population … set off from the real contribution to solving national issues because of a division of race lines …

… the most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we're both poor, but that's kind of it. There wasn't much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.

All the poor white people, all the poor black people, all the Hispanics, they're in the same boat. They've got no economic opportunities.

When I lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I was rather proud that my landlord was almost the only African-American in my unofficially segregated neighbourhood (the other one was the adopted child of our admirable next-door neighbours).

While 'The Wire' feels startlingly lifelike, it is not, in fact, a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, 'The Corner,' which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto.

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

Especially in black communities, we've been so groomed to stay where we are and not like people in the other neighborhoods. It's crazy. It won't allow people to experience life and see what the world truly has to offer. People are stuck in their ways, stuck in their communities, stuck on their streets.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you're immigrants, you're not part of that history.