Leonard Fournette Quotes

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

It might be that my poverty is my fault—the result of my ineptitude or my laziness. However, is there any way that the poverty that my child is condemned to is his fault? He certainly does not have the same opportunity as my child would if I were rich. But where then is our equality of opportunity?

We are less than honest and commit a grave error if we insist that what happened to Rodney G. King was isolated and an exceptional case. The poor know better.

Not all cops are bad, but this kind of harassment has been going on for years in the ghetto.

The George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair is one of the most important and clarifying moments in American history.

If you asked me why I went to jail, the easiest explanation would be to say, 'Because I'm black.'

The biggest problem in America is most people believe poor people are poor because they are lazy.

White people get to do that all of the time. They get to engage in bad behavior, even felonious behavior, but they rarely wind up in jail. But as a black person, losing your temper can cost you your life. Or insisting on your rights can cost you your life.

I know what it's like to feel hopeless and to feel like you're not good enough just because of where you're from. I know what it's like to be profiled and to be abused by the police. I know what it's like to be racially profiled, treated unjustly and abused by the police just because of how you look.

However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

Racial profiling has to stop.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

I believe in the law. I think we have a great system of justice. But I do think that system of justice has been corrupted by racism and classism. I think it's difficult for 'poor people' - poor white people, brown people - to be treated fairly before the law in the same way that upper-class people are.

Because I'm a young black man driving a really nice, expensive car, I sometimes get harassed when I'm rolling through a ghetto neighbourhood.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

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.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

He that despises his neighbor's happiness because he wears a worsted cap or a leather apron, he that struts immeasurably above the lower size of the people, and pretends to adjust the rights of the men by the distinctions of fortune

It is a mistake to condemn a horse for being slim and to condemn a capable person for being poor.

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

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.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder