Barry Jenkins Quotes

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

Class still matters in Britain today.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

Many times, people attack the well-to-do people. They see an opportunity.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it's not even racism anymore: it's placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.

There are but two families in the world … The haves and the have-nots.

Our rich people are not an ethnic minority. A poor person in Tennessee or Arkansas can say, "I'm not wealthy, but maybe my son or my daughter can grow up to be Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton." That's absolutely not true in countries like Zimbabwe, or Burma, or Indonesia, or Bolivia, where the majority of the people look around and they say, "Everybody who's rich belongs to a different ethnic group.

You can have class in the ghetto and trash in the White House.

To be concerned about inequality is not engaging in class warfare.

I take much of the attacks and the criticism toward me as being very class-based, but as Americans we don't like to acknowledge that reality.

I think class is still an issue in this country.

Black America has always felt itself divided into two classes: the mucky-mucks and the folk.

America is a country that would rather talk about race than class.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.

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.

In all the world, rich people are very unpopular.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

Washing dishes as a 17-year-old in an Oxford college and seeing the privileged lifestyles of the undergraduates there convinced me that a system that allowed luxury for the few at the expense of the many needed to be challenged.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.