Malcolm Jenkins Quotes

I've always wanted to work with young people from disadvantaged areas.

The reason most of the children are having problems in any inner-city neighborhood is because they don't see enough positive role models in their own environment.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

I think race is very important. I think generally speaking, we've to face the general problem, which is that we are seeing more children coming out of families which simply don't give them adequate resources for their development.

There are no quick fixes to Indigenous poverty and social disaster.

There is definitely places in America where, if you're born into that environment, your chances of getting out are really, really limited.

I applaud President Obama for launching his 'My Brother's Keeper' initiative that is aimed to empower our youth to achieve success.

Faced with the way the system does you in the 'hood sometimes, if you don't literally get out, your chances are slim. You'll definitely die mentally. You'll pretty much die physically.

But when I see a story on welfare on television, they only show black people.

Most of black America is in housing projects, without jobs, living on welfare. And this is not the case in 'The Cosby Show,' because all the values in that household are strictly what I would call white American values.

The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

Can we in good conscience expect youth to work within the system when we deny them that very opportunity?

The fact that policies often fail for no good reason is annoying but less depressing than the view that it is a big conspiracy against the poor… Name your favorite enemy… capitalism, corruption … Our view is easier. You think hard about the problems and you can solve them.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

Violence of all forms is wreaking havoc in communities across the country, disproportionately impacting communities of color and shaving half a million years of life off our collective lifespan. But it doesn't have to be this way.

And if you want to make many of our black leaders angry, just tell them that racism is not the number problem that black Americans face.

The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.

I think tech lives inside of a society that still has a lot of systemic racism and doesn't stop at the boundaries of the tech industry. But neither is it especially exacerbated by being around technology. But it is maybe exacerbated by the irrational decision making of people who are trying to make money.

Nobody would deny that if someone was a billionaire in 1962, his billions are going to affect all of his descendants. The reverse is also true. The lack of education, material, and finances for a slave are going to affect the descendants of that individual as well.

I don't understand Chicago, but I really do hope that the Commander-in-Chief addresses his home town. I think those young kids don't see outside their small box. I think they don't see outside their circumstances, so they kind of resort to anything.

Most children of the underclass are born out of wedlock; relationships are fleeting and unstable (which ensures that what is born into the underclass stays in the underclass). This is a world in which there are almost no worthwhile male role models, which is a disaster when boys turn to youths.

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

I get the urge people will have after Trump. 'Look at the chaos and the exhaustion: Wouldn't it be better to go back to something more stable with somebody we know?' But there's no going back to a pre-Trump universe. We can't be saying the system will be fine again just like it was. Because that's not true; it wasn't fine.

Effectively transcending and conquering the legacies of enchainment, impoverishment and racial denigration continue to elude us. Residual elements of the plantation-based past continue to shape our societies and determine their trajectories.

Systemically, there hasn't been an oppression more overt and long-lasting than economic oppression against black people and minorities in this country.