Rosario Dawson Quotes

I've always written about social concerns. My first book was about Spanish Harlem.

I grew up in the inner city and have spent a lot of time there and have dealt with a lot of patients from that area and recognize that we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!

I'll tell you what, our inner cities are so, so bad right now. The danger, the crime, the lack of education, no jobs. African Americans are living in hell in our - in the inner cities. I mean, they're living - they're living in hell. You walk to the store for a loaf of bread; you get shot.

Hip-hop is a voice for voiceless poor people.

I know two L.A.s. Half my life was around the house my folks had for 46 years at 3rd and Norton. The other half was in Boyle Heights on the Eastside, working with gang members.

I started writing because I saw such a huge lack of complex stories about the inner city.

I get out in the 'hoods. I want to go to the worst, the grimiest places. That's where I want to be. Those are usually the kids or the communities that kind of get left behind or forgotten about. I feel like I was in that situation at one point. That's where my mindset is and that's what I stand for.

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

There's a part of me that's trying to represent kids that don't necessarily have the same outlet that I have. I'm not looking towards a new demographic. I'm looking towards the demographic I came from.

I have a wonderful, diverse, and young staff at the AAPF who pretty much work around the clock trying to figure out how we promote the idea that social justice requires us to be intersectional in our thinking and in our scope of vision.

We need a more holistic approach in which we take account of society's most vulnerable sectors. We shouldn't just do broad averaging of country statistics but rather we need to disaggregate the data to determine where the resources are most needed. In most cases, it's usually the reverse: those who are most marginalized - minorities and rural and remote communities - get the least attention and money.

Once any group in society stands in a relatively deprived position in relation to other groups, it is genuinely deprived.

Economic growth is the key to everything. But once you have economic growth, it is important that we reach out to people who live in the shadows, the people who don't seem to ever think that they get a fair deal. And that includes people in our minority community; that includes people who feel as though they don't have a chance to move up.

As far as inner cities, I was very strong on the inner cities during the campaign, I think it's probably got me much higher percentage of the African American vote than lot of people thought I was going to get. We did much higher than people thought I was going to get. I was honored by that.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

It's the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren't small at all.

I am from the inner city, the ghetto. If I can use my platform to carry on a legacy and talk about something that's real, I have to do that, period.

The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level.

I always emphasize the historic role of people of color in organizing and protesting to achieve justice.

About the state of black America, I've been working on that for many, many years. And [Donald Trump] said certain things in his early days about wanting to do something about it. We have a lot of violence in our neighborhoods now. We need education. And we need jobs. Is what I'm trying to say.

We have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people. We have Hispanic-American people that are in the inner cities and they are living in hell.

Whether the people in Haiti, the young kids in Chicago that [are] going through violence, or whether you're in Atlanta or L.A. or Europe - it's not even color barriers for me - I go to where I know there's a lot of turmoil and pain.

One thing that you consistently see everywhere is that the poor and the under-represented are always the ones who are going to suffer the most and get the short end of the stick.