Hill Harper Quotes

The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.

The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.

As a black millennial, I remember with horrid detail how Democratic policies ravaged my community and destroyed my family.

African-Americans know about racism, but I don't think we really know the causes. I decided it's first of all a family problem.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

I can understand a family that's imploding. I have experience of that in my own life.

I came in the gate as an African-American poor kid wanting to be a neurosurgeon but - with American life and the places I was put due to American history and laws and the oppression of black people - I had to make it work in other ways.

If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally, and within the society.

When you say 'the man of the house,' the black woman has been the woman and the man of the house, because black men have so often had to spend all of their time and energy working and trying, at least, to give their families the basic needs. So black women, I find, are not really concerned about women's liberation.

My family's messed up, for real.

We must begin to tell black women's stories because, without them, we cannot tell the story of black men, white men, white women, or anyone else in this country. The story of black women is critical because those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate 'poor' in our public consciousness with 'black.' Terms such as 'welfare queen' and 'culture of poverty' became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.

Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

It is devastating that jail is seen as a rite of passage for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, part of the natural order of things. It is an outrage that there is an attitude that this is normal. This is not normal. We can't shrug our shoulders and say this is just a 'fact of life' in remote Australia.

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.

There is some group of Americans who are really, really curious to understand how we ended up at this point, where every week it seems like you can turn on your TV and see some sort of abuse being heaped on black people.

We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.

In the past, I said I didn't want to speak on certain issues because the second I said one thing about race, then 'Tyron's playing the race card.' But if you really think about it, what is the race card? The race card is that the man held me down, I had unfair circumstances, and I wasn't able to be successful because I was held down.

What was most important, for me, is that I could share what I experience as a young person - in particular, what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family's life.

Although racism does, of course, occur in individual acts, these acts are part of a larger system that we all participate in. The focus on individual incidences prevents the analysis that is necessary in order to challenge this larger system.

I don't know the statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that a disproportionate number of comics come from broken homes.

As a black woman, the government is so much in my life, and it always has been.