Talib Kweli Quotes

Given that by age 23, almost a third of Americans are arrested for a crime, it becomes clear that in the new militarized state young people, especially poor minorities, are viewed as predators, a threat to corporate governance, and are treated as disposable populations.

The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.

Just because you are poor and have no voice does not mean that you don’t deserve police protection.

We find ourselves ordered by the Government to cast out those we have tried for so long to help. The effort of a parent to feed his or her children is criminalized.

My sister women, those struggling with social problems, and those who slave all their lives long for a community – shop, factory and domestic slaves, earning barely a subsistence, and thrown aside to death or the parish when they are no longer profitable – mothers, bearing and rearing children, seeing them go forth… and spending their own last years, lonely and unconsidered in the cheerless wards of the workhouse.

If a man dies of hunger, all the people of the district are responsible for his death

With what moral authority can they [the U. S.] speak of human rights — the rulers of a nation in which the millionaire and beggar coexist; the Indian is exterminated; the black man is discriminated against; the woman is prostituted; and the great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Latin Americans are scorned, exploited, and humiliated?

If this is the second century of slumdom, it is also the 14th year of a self-governed state, when the babies of 1916 are still, as men and women, crying for a happier life for their babies, crying for a simple shelter.

Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed.

We need radical, transformative solutions to address the inequality that is blighting millions of people's lives.

I can't speak for the rest, but I think the little India all of us carry in our hearts should be good enough for us individually to take a step to help ensure that same freedom and justice that our constitution guarantees is given to all.

Civil rights cases are hard to win.

I felt like if I didn't write about what happened to the young men here in the South of America, the same things would keep occurring. Here in the South, young black men just keep dying - young black women, too. I couldn't live with myself if I hadn't been as honest as possible about that.

The good news is that the American people, not just the African-American community are saying enough is enough. You can't hold people in custody and suddenly find out that they are dead. You can't shoot people in the back.

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals.

Poor minorities live in a new age of Jim Crow, one in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering and authoritarianism.

Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.

There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability—having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.

The mass incarceration of poor people of color, particularly black men, has emerged as a new caste system, one specifically designed to address the social, economic, and political challenges of our time.

A lot of people are now criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft for his policy on detaining what he considers suspicious people. I think he's going a little overboard. Today, he arrested the entire band Foreigner.

Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for the poor, young people and the elderly.

We started America with the sin of slavery that led right into the post-reconstruction period which was the greatest period of domestic terrorism in our country's history. Then after that, we had Jim Crow emerge and just when the Jim Crow laws were ending came the onslaught of the drug war. Well, the drug war has so perniciously effected, insidiously infected communities of color that in some ways it has come full circle, and we now have more African Americans under criminal supervision than all of the slaves in 1865. This is a profoundly unjust war.

The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.

God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human!

We have more families at risk with the death penalty. It targets the voiceless, the poor, people of color. And so it's important just to understand what your government is doing and how much they are spending.