Kerby Jean-Raymond Quotes

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

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

When the residue of oppression and fear are compounded over time, when the historical precedents of policing and discrimination manifest themselves over and over again, the very act of waking up to a world complicit in your distress can feel like a herculean task. But black people are human beings, just like everyone else.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

What people don't know about oppression is that the oppressor works much harder. You always grew up being told you were not smart enough or not fast enough, but we all lived from the time we were children to beat the system.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

I'm not trying to say that it never hurt or that I never felt its sting, but I can honestly say that I never blamed anybody for racism. I have considered it more of a manifestation of humanity's problem rather than my personal problem.

Inequality doesn't create unhappiness.

When someone lives as a minority, they experience the world differently than those of us who live in the majority. We may occupy the same physical space, but we don't occupy the same psychic space.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

Inequality causes problems by creating fissures in societies, leaving those at the bottom feeling marginalized or disenfranchised.

Because Katrina put it out there, no one can play the pretend game anymore that there isn't poverty and inequality in this country. The Millions More Movement - Katrina gives it added significance.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

Inequality is on the rise.

I have never been able to discover anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient - in America.

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.

Welfare for the wealthy simply can no longer be afforded.

We [Blacks] wear the mask that grins and lies It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.

The condition of white people in this State is such that they must labor in competition with the negro laborer.

If I may seem a bit moved about this, it is because of the hell I have been through because I am a Negro, and I think this committee ought to show a little more consideration for the democracy that Negroes are denied .... the menace that ought to be paid attention to is the menace where 14 or 15 million Negroes have no place to turn to feel that they are protected.

This society cannot go forward, the way we have been going forward, where the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.