Tarana Burke Quotes

I just think the most difficult thing to displace is privilege.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

I hate systemic oppression in America.

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

I think we're living in a world where society is very difficult.

Unrestrained liberalism only makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker and excludes the most excluded.

One of the things I keep coming back to in my writing is that society doesn't work on this mirror principle, you don't have an exact replica on the left of what you have on the right. It just doesn't work that way.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

I've completely lost faith in the Democratic Party to truly serve the disadvantaged.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

The paradox of American democracy has been that its slogan of equal opportunity has meant, often, equal opportunity to get power over your fellows.

As you would expect when individualism is based only on opportunity, no one asks what happens to those who have neither the financial nor the political clout to exercise their tiny portion of that opportunity.

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

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 will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

Those who are privileged have little regard for history.

The elites benefit from affirmative action programs even when those programs are designed to help the masses.

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

It's always going to be a fight for anyone who isn't an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn't have a fight.

I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.

We've lost our way if we turn our backs on millions of Americans in need.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

To me poverty, mental health, and addictions don't sound like criminal justice problems. They sound to me like a social justice problem.