Steve James Quotes

James Brown's life was really a metaphor for our inability to talk about matters like race and class in America.

Twenty years on, the books are still fun to write and I've still got lots of stories I want to tell, mainly about social injustice and people chewed up by the system.

The fight still isn't people of colour versus white. It's the people versus the system built to keep us down. That's the first line of the Constitution. And the system is manmade but is made of no man. Everyone, regardless of class, creed, culture and ethnicity can fight the system and help to break it down.

The sharecropper may lower his eyes, but not because he's less of a man. That's just a condition of society that such things exist.

I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.

The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate.

America is like a melting pot. The people at the bottom get burned, and the scum floats to the top.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth. The historical method is supposed to prove that economic changes have been the inevitable outcome of natural laws. It just as often proves them to have been brought about by the self-seeking action of dominant classes.

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.

The issue with race particularly within this country is largely because of lack of dialogue.

What you must understand is oppression does not end with the niggers. It does not end with the poor people, it doesn't end with the women, or the pregnant women. It goes on up the line to the executive who has his bag searched in the airport.

Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.

At the moment we have a ruling class that has one law and the people the other.

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

I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.

There are certain things that they say you can't do, there are all these secret people behind the scenes who make things available for you to do. That's why you have so much crime and violence.

If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor, even when they don't mean to.

I'm the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I'm a victim again. A result.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

But you know, the system almost destroyed itself while it was goin' on trying to destroy us.

And understand: class differences will not save you.

A black man singing about a blond girl was potential trouble.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

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

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.