Janine di Giovanni Quotes

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 you people can’t afford to live in our town, then you’ll just have to leave.

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

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.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

There is this notion that the lives of the comfortable-off middle class don't merit being treated seriously and with compassion.

There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.

The migration of the black middle class out of the cities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the deindustrialization of urban economies has left a corroded core, cut off from the social; mainstream and reliant on inadequate federal support.

The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart.

The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.

In a world of increasing inequality, the legitimacy of institutions that give precedence to the property rights of 'the Haves' over the human rights of 'the Have Nots' is inevitably called into serious question.

Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

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.

Segregation by race has declined gradually since 1970, but separation by income has grown steadily in the same period.

It's not an underclass anymore; it's an outer class.

There are two Americas. One which influences government and economic policy and the other which must live with the results.

I myself am a descendant of the European tribes, now called nations, that have established political, military, and economic dominance over the world. I confess to my sin of privilege and my reluctance to forego the perks my race and class afford me.

The rich have all the speech they want; the poor have lockjaw.

We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.