Stephen A. Smith Quotes

The laws are stacked for the wealthy.

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

Short of genius a rich man cannot even imagine poverty.

But in my life, the vast majority of people that have really afforded me the opportunity to succeed were white folks.

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

It isn't the rich people's fault that poor people are poor. Poor people who get an education and work hard in this country will stop being poor. That should be the goal for all poor people everywhere.

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.

Inequality is on the rise.

That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.

Only blacks can play the race card, apparently; only they think in racial terms, at least to hear white America tell it.

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

The ability to take advantage of freedom and democracy is proportional to the size of your bank account.

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

Thought the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by an adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements. In his downward course he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every step of his progress.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

To say that a millionaire son of a Black deserves a preference over a poor White is pure madness.

... popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty.

It is astonishing to see how little some of our would-be great and wise white men know about the Negro, his ability, his progress, his books, newspapers, churches, home tastes, etc.

Poverty is a national issue and needs a federal response. After all, U.S. federal government policies helped produce massive income inequality by lopsided breaks for the super wealthy.

Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion.

We had particular policies in this country that resulted in the larger share of poverty that we have in African-American communities.

Globalization in the aggregate generates wealth, no question. But it gets concentrated.