Alden Nowlan Quotes

Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

So much talent comes from the base of poverty and those in the margins. You limit the base, you miss too much talent.

The biggest problem in South Africa is that we have a disrupted timeline. Historically, politically, spiritually, economically, in people's minds, in people's heads.

As a city, we have to face the reality that New York's minority communities experience a disproportionate share of violent crime.

Poverty is an artificial, external imposition on a human being; it is not innate in a human being. And since it is external, it can be removed. It is just a question of doing it.

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

Those who are privileged have little regard for history.

I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have - women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same.

As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.

I always think that my assignment is to seek out stories that are experienced by people who don't get the ticket for Easy Street.

It's very easy for one talking about violence and hatred for the white man to appeal to [Negro from ghetto]. I have never thought of this, but I think this is quite true, that if, even if you talk to them about nonviolence from a tactical point of view, they can't quite see it because they don't even know they're outnumbered.

One thing that you consistently see everywhere is that the poor and the under-represented are always the ones who are going to suffer the most and get the short end of the stick.

Poverty. Racism. Isn't it strange, only the homeless are begging for change?

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.

If you belong to the underclass, you are already guilty.

Stuff Happens.’ That’s the G-rated version. That’s a bumper sticker that only a straight white upper middle class male could have made. Because anyone who isn’t straight, anyone who isn’t male, anyone who isn’t white, anyone who isn’t upper middle class knows that stuff doesn’t just happen. Stuff gets done by people to people. Nothing is a coincidence. Nothing is random. This isn’t osmosis. And so we act as if it’s this passive thing, but yet that’s not the case.

You can look at a slum or a peasant village, but it is only by entering into the world - by living in it -that you begin to understand what it is like to be powerless, to be like Christ.

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.