Majora Carter Quotes

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

The degree of influence with government, is dependant upon a variety of resources- of time, of money, of learned capacity- that are distributed unevenly between different sections of the population.

I don't come from a privileged background.

It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.

I don't think it's good for people to be born into money and not know what it is never to have it.

As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility - which I do.

It's amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn.

If it is held to be morally wrong and anti-social for one man to possess huge estates, which he may develop or not as he chooses, while hundreds of others nearby are relegated to landlessness, why should one people acquire, by similar accident of birth or achievement, a claim to an inordinate share of the good things of life and a right to exclude from them other less fortunate peoples, white, black, or yellow?

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'

Barriers today are largely class-based - income, networks, education. And those affect many white people as well.

The Indian elite send their children to expensive private schools, bypassing the public school system. They have their own infrastructure for water, with sumps to store it, pumps to lift it, and fancy filters to de-risk from erratic, polluted government water. Most access private healthcare to bridge the health services deficit.

We live in a world where not everyone has the urge to help others... It is OK to encourage others to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, but if you do, just remember that some people have no boots.

Generally speaking in America, a lot of environmentally problematic facilities tend to be located in places where poor folks live because wealthier folks have the ability to say, "not in my backyard."

One man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and the other with a wooden ladle.

Modern buildings have become memorials to power and capital. More and more, they're isolated from people.

I just heard that some lead was coming into Newark into schools, and I asked the question, "Whose schools?" They said, "The Black and the Brown." Is that an accident? I don't think so. We are being designed to be destroyed - and unless we see that, and come together as a people under vicious attack we will suffer the consequences of evil that's in high places.

Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.

I don't understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?

Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

We all have choices. (Astrid) No we don’t, princess. Only people with money and influence have choices. For the rest of us, basic necessity dictates what we have to do to survive. (Zarek)

I'm not one of these people who thinks everyone born into privilege should wear sack cloth and ashes. But it's something I wrestle with. I know a lot of people who live below the poverty level and have for a long time and it makes them uneasy to think they'll have to interact with people from different economic levels. Everyone has some sort of load put on them, whatever the circumstances they're born into.