Michael Dyson Quotes

George W. Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were black and poor.

Government at every level failed the Katrina victims.

We only have to recall the color of the faces of those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

We continue to blame the poor for their own condition. They are lazy. We do not want to know that the poorest of the poor are toddlers under three years of age.

The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.

The worst part of great poverty is that you become blind to it.

Part of this country's problem is that people from New York City - Wall Streeters - don't think about the little guy who can't afford things.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

Poverty is an open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.

The chaos of poverty feeds on itself.

We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities.

My father and his eight siblings grew up in the kind of poverty that Americans don't like to talk about unless a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina strikes, and then the conversation only lasts as long as the news cycle. His family squatted in shacks. The children scavenged for food.

In a country like Mexico, you can't forget about poverty - about how half of the population lives in poverty, and how half of that half live in extreme poverty.

A shining city is perhaps all the President [Ronald Reagan] sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the shining city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, and more people who need help and can't find it.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course. Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic.

Poverty is not a trait of character. It is created anew in each generation but not by heredity, by circumstances.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

All God’s dangers ain’t White men.

The real threat to the democracy is the half a nation in poverty.

... popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty.

People are prejudiced but water isn’t. The Katrina flood went everywhere.

I see tens of millions of its citizens--a substantial part of its whole population--who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

Poor people do not cause poverty. Poverty is thrust upon them.