Carl Hart Quotes

Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

And if you want to make many of our black leaders angry, just tell them that racism is not the number problem that black Americans face.

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 you're poor and black in America, you stand a greater chance of going to prison for something you didn't do.

Systemically, there hasn't been an oppression more overt and long-lasting than economic oppression against black people and minorities in this country.

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

Our communities are reeling from poverty, from unemployment, from discrimination of all sorts and different interactions that they're having with the law enforcement, and education system, and so on.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

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

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

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.

All the grand work was laid for people who came after me. The Supreme Court decided not to give it to me, so they gave it to two white guys. I think that's what they were waiting for.

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.

The poor are discussed as this homogeneous mash, like porridge. The idea that they might be individuals, and be where they are for very different, diverse reasons, again seems to escape some people.

But when I see a story on welfare on television, they only show black people.

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

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

This nation has always struggled with how it was going to deal with poor people and people of color. Every few years you will see some great change in the way that they approach this. We've had the war on poverty that never really got into waging a real war on poverty.

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