Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

I am not, and never have been, a member of the 'White Establishment.'

That's the nightmare for Elizabeth Warren, because I can attack her from the left. I can say, 'Wait a minute, what do you know about the journey of a person of color? You know nothing. This is all theory to you. Because you did lie. You took advantage of affirmative action.'

Only white men have the luxury of ignoring race.

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.

I am performing this role of the artist and this role of the 'negress' coming into a white-box institution. It's kind of a self-appointed role: the self-designated negress.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet.

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

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.

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

Keeping people on the margins of cultural, social and political life constitutes in many nations one of the most glaring injustices of our time.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

The mayor’s administration and staff is like the Rocky Mountains. There higher up it gets, the whiter it gets.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.

Poverty is sexist.

Resentment — that feeling when the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.

It has become impossible to deny or obscure the great chasm . . . between an elite that seizes modernity’s choicest fruits while disdaining older truths and uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves cheated of the same fruits, recoil into cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality.

Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender - and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.

There's always been a quiet conversation and joke that if you're not hard, if you're not from impoverished neighborhoods, if you're not certain constructs of a black stereotype, then you not black.

Race affects everything that I do, and everything that I create speaks to intersectionality.

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.

I've never seen baseball advertise for a job, and I've never heard of whites applying for a job. I mean, there's an old boy network, and it's lily white.

We should recognise the mirrors of exclusion and mirrors of extremism in our society. The inequalities and disadvantages among visible minorities are also prevalent in the white working class. Political extremism and disengagement is mirrored between white and ethnic minority communities.