Justin Cartwright Quotes

At the turn of the 20th century, the disparity in literacy here in the U.S. largely came down to race. Nearly half of minorities at that time - 45 percent - were illiterate, while 94 percent of white citizens were literate.

My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.

As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.

I come from a community plagued with so much poverty and violence and homophobia.

It is not a coincidence that we have managed to send rockets into space, but our literacy rate continues to be below the world average. It is because governments don't want an educated electorate. Because if we get educated, we will start asking the right questions. And they don't want the right questions being asked.

I've always been the underdog, and I've always had to work much harder than the next person just to get a look. But I feel like that's Black people as a whole, to be honest with you. We have to do so much more and work so much harder to get certain kinds of looks within this industry.

We still have an underclass in this country who are constantly ignored and vilified.

Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.

Politics also reflects the fault lines in our society, and the fact is that it is not very easy for any marginalised group to come forward in any domain.

We know that there are people in our nation, black people, who are systematically being disenfranchised in a number of spheres in our lives.

I think, for me, the biggest issue is poverty in general, poverty in this time of plenty. It's reflected in homelessness. It's reflected in educational gaps. It's reflected in racial disparities.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

Social immobility is driven by family background, instability in childhood and often by parents who don't know how to give children the right start in life.

You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.

I wanted to remind myself and others of the old Jim Crow, so that we can remind ourselves that we're still living in the new Jim Crow. I feel it's important to dress in the fashion of the times.

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

White people need to wake up and tell the truth about US history and the inequality and the ways in which racism is so entrenched.

I spent my life navigating systems built upon me - a black child in America - not making it out.

It's like, 'Oh, great, drag queens can excel!' - but then the ceiling is so low. You're only allowed on the first floor; you're not allowed to go play with the big boys upstairs. Even RuPaul, who's a massive success, has been limited to where her music career can take her.

I can tell you as a black person in South Carolina whose grandparents grew up through Jim Crow, when you lose the courts and justice no longer becomes just, we're in a world of trouble.

For decades now, Republicans and Democrats have shared the same mythology around the great American meritocracy. The only real difference was that republicans thought the American meritocracy was already perfect and Democrats believed it could be perfected if we just dealt with racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry.

There are so many - namely black and brown bodies - who have experienced a different America than what the mainstream American flag symbolizes.

I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the '60s and '70s where overt racism ruled the day.

We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.

Everyone who has a pair of eyes in this country understands the racial tensions and the issues we have are very serious and they're not going away. Just because we had Barack Obama as our president and, on paper, everything looks equal, it's very clearly not.