Michael Dyson Quotes

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

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.

Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

In one sense, the stories I read betrayed me. Too few gave me back my mirror image. Fewer still spoke to, or acknowledged, the existence of the problems I faced as a black foster child from a dysfunctional and badly broken home.

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slaver's scars, I am the Red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same ole stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I grew up in small-town America, black, disadvantaged.

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

As a black woman, I feel like I have a unique experience that we don't often see in media portrayals of the South.

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.

Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.

The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color.

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

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

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

We [Blacks] wear the mask that grins and lies It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.

We Blacks have a long history of serving as cannon fodder for interests that are not our own.

What's going to be a hundred years from now ain't much account to us.... The whites has the lands and the sense, an' the blacks has nothin' but their freedom, an' it's jest like a dream to them.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

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.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.