W. Kamau Bell Quotes

Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

South Africa is labouring to find its revolutionary path; the colours of the Rainbow Nation have difficulty blending together; the wealthy elites (white, black or Indian) profit from de facto segregation.

It's not unusual for socio-economic, even racial or ethnic, groups to cluster.

Segregation by race has declined gradually since 1970, but separation by income has grown steadily in the same period.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we're both poor, but that's kind of it. There wasn't much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.

Staten Island is segregated, but it's also - I don't know. It's, like, it's not - it's not unprogressive.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles from New York in 2004 to try to break into television, I couldn't believe how segregated it was - how many neighborhoods were nearly all-white or all-black or -Asian or -Latino.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

The freeways create economic and racial borders in Los Angeles. South of Interstate 10 is one group of people, west of the 10 another, and south of the 405 North yet another.

I have nothing but the best memories of growing up in New Jersey. Of course, I grew up in a nice town, a suburb. But Tenafly was right next to Englewood, which had a tremendous amount of racial tension in the '60s. So I was aware of the real world.

I have always thought that the rapid economic development of South Africa would in the long run prove to be incompatible with the government's racial policies, and recent events have tended to confirm my opinion.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.

In the States, it takes you a lifetime just to get from Chicago's South Side to the West Side.

Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets ... the rich and the poor.

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

Federal, state and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class and income.

Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized: FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.

There are two Baltimores. There are clearly two Baltimores.

Chicago's one of the most segregated cities in America. Everybody lives in their own silos and vacuums.

There are caste systems in American cities: Many are marginalized to the edges of urban centers due to real estate costs; price tags seem to lurk around human encounters; there's a cult of overwork in the middle class; workers at your local manicurist, your local fast casual restaurant, are exploited.

I think 'Mudbound' reveals the interconnectiveness of our stories. You can't separate out threads of history and race as economic construct. 'Mudbound' makes it very plain. Race is about commerce; it's not an actual thing. It's a fiction that was created to basically divide resources unequally.

I grew up in an area that was the typical city that was a racially divided and economically segregated place. And it had a big influence on me.