Roger Ross Williams Quotes

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

Leaders of the business community ... have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country - a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old. .

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

We need to have a discussion on race, but we also need to have a discussion on how we are treating poor and minority people in this country.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

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.

White America is tortured by black America's failure to thrive, and all that guilt and anxiety has only gotten worse as a substantial quota of white America loses its own footing in the middle class and plunges into the rough country of joblessness, hopelessness, and government dependency.

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.

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

I am one of them. I am a black woman, the daughter of a dining car waiter. You do not seem to understand who I am.

I don't want our white working class sisters and brothers to feel as though their pain is not important because it is. But at the same time, I want my white sisters and brothers to understand that when we talk about income and wealth inequality, that disproportionately African Americans suffer a little more.

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.

I did not grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

It's interesting because I think class is a heavy, heavy part of 'Moonlight,' and I think, in a certain way, through the sum of all these parts, it's become a commentary on the black experience in America.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

Racism is just the symptom, but the fight is economic.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Reckless capitalism kills black people.

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.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.