Rod Lurie Quotes

If you were born white, you automatically have a monstrous advantage educationally, economically, culturally, and within the society.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

I don't totally believe that all of the politicians see a problem with the gap between the scores of black children and other groups. I believe that many politicians think this has been the way it has always been, so what's the problem?

Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.

The Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.

I think it goes back to whether or not race and class - that is, race and poverty - is not becoming even more of a constraint. Because with the failing public schools, I worry that the way that my grandparents got out of poverty, the way that my parents became educated, is just not going to be there for a whole bunch of kids.

In terms of addressing crime issues in the black community, the dominant political class has historically refused to endorse the full slate of reforms along lines of education, economic security, housing, etc, necessary to address the root causes.

If you read some of the recent literature, there is no such thing as whiteness. But we made it up. Not my original thought, but it's true. Because you were born white, you have advantages systemically, culturally, psychology there. They have been built up for hundreds of years. Many people can't look at it.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

If you're black in this country, if you're a woman in this country, if you are any minority in this country at all, what could possibly possess you to vote Republican?

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.

It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

The U. S, Social Security Act not only takes the Afro-American for a ride, but aids immediately in perpetuating his inferior status, What we see here, as in most other 'liberal' legislation, in a further stratifying of the Negro at the bottom of the ladder of life. .

While all of us have been impoverished spiritually by this stigma upon our nation, minority groups of color such as the Blacks, the American Indians, and the Mexican-Americans have borne the brunt of this malady

Segregation of schools is no accident.

Savage Inequalities