Ray Nagin Quotes

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

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.

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

The trend of psychology, education, anthropology, and social science is toward environmentalism in the explanation of group differences, which means that the racial beliefs which defended caste are being torn away. It also means, by implication, that the white majority group in power is accused of being the cause of the Negro's deficiencies and unhappiness.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

Class prejudice is applied both the white and black poor, whose demographic traits are converging. But classism combines with latent and historic racism to create a particularly malicious brew. People are now assigned a whole range of supposedly underclass traits based on a single glimpse of skin color.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but if he finds only whites among his judges… His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same alter.

The white race ... will be proprietors of the land, and the blacks its cultivators; such is their destiny.

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.

The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.

What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.

The same things that lead to disparities in health in this country on a day-to-day basis led to disparities in the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

The respective classes of inhabitants began to feel that they had equal rights, and as the coloured population so far exceeded the white, the safety of the latter was threatened.

We repudiate the rights of a privileged class, and uphold the rights of a privileged race.

They (negroes) had for more than a century before the Declaration of Independence been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it.