Ayanna Pressley Quotes

If those communities are left to decay, this city will decay.

I saw in Chicago, on the street where I was visiting my sister-in-law, this "Urban Renewal" and it means one thing: "Negro removal." But they want to tear the homes down and put a parking lot there. Where are those people going? Where will they go? And as soon as Negroes take to the street demonstrating, one hears people say, "they shouldn't have done it." The world is looking at America and it is really beginning to show up for what it is really like. "Go Tell It on the Mountain." We can no longer ignore this, that America is not "the land of the free and the home of the brave."

If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties should continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.

You cannot let men live like pigs …. We need not wait for the Millennium to get rid of the slum. We can do it now.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

What's wrong with Hell's Kitchen? You don't change a neighborhood by changing its name. You change it by building a school.

'Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto' is a surprise and a fresh way of looking at Harlem, connecting the black district with the architecture of its historical past.

I used to live in a street in Bristol which was, depending on your tabloid of choice, either Britain's most dangerous street or a moral cesspit. People made judgments about me on where I lived. It affected me - it affected my life chances. That is going on today with people in social housing. That, to me, isn't acceptable.

It's kind of almost not fair that certain people don't get the opportunities that others get just because of where they are born or where they were brought up.

There are so many people out there struggling with racism, or their sexuality or where they're brought up or how wealthy their family was ans these issues are not hidden, they were in the late 19 century and they're still important today.

Gentrification and housing shortages are complex issues.

I've been sort of gentrification-obsessed. Right before I left Oakland in 2012, I was feeling it. Now I go back sporadically, and the change is drastic.

According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

There are people who get to be three-dimensional humans in the United States, and there are people who do not.

With any sort of minority, issues of ostracization or misrepresentation are clearly rampant. It's just so deeply rooted in our culture, and there are so many levels that it trickles down from.

My take on gentrification and change is it's usually always a better thing, because when you see all these businesses open and flourishing, that means there are more jobs.

Race is such a contentious issue because of the painful history of racism. Race didn't create racism, but racism created race.

I grew up in small-town America, black, disadvantaged.

I try not to get too political. But coming from South Africa, where apartheid was a huge problem, and there was lots of inequality, has shaped me in terms of how I view certain issues.

Can we first take care of our 'brown lives matter' in India and then worry about the U.S.? I find it bizarre that racism that is done so far away from home it is creating such an uproar. Look at the kind of racism people who are dark skinned in our country have to face.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

Intersectionality is not easy. It's not as though the existing frameworks that we have - from our culture, our politics, or our law - automatically lead people to being conversant and literate in intersectionality.

I have to battle so many issues, and the biggest is racism.

Racism can be called our nation's own specific 'original sin.'