Kenny Smith Quotes

I could have easily been a statistic. Growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., it was easy - a little too easy - to get into trouble. Surrounded by poor schools, lack of resources, high unemployment rates, poverty, gangs and more, I watched as many of my peers fell victim to a vicious cycle of diminished opportunities and imprisonment.

Yesterday in this country we had people die of hunger and malnutrition. In some parts of this country, the infant mortality rate rivals that of sub-Saharan Africa. We have a public education system that ranks below that of almost any other Western nation.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

Hunger is almost like something the West does. It's almost like the direct result of the way the West performs.

We have weapons of mass destruction we have to address here at home. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction. Homelessness is a weapon of mass destruction. Unemployment is a weapon of mass destruction.

When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

It’s poverty and hunger that drive these students to the madrasahs.

Until a leader drinks the dirty water from the wells … and then falls ill, he will not understand anything about poverty.

We have a community where almost 50 percent of the people in the city of Cleveland alone have some type of record. I represent one of the poorest districts in America - out of 435, I'm 422.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!

Urbanisation, poverty, youth unemployment are leading to violence-prone cities.

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.

All too easily I have had people dismiss food poverty as an affliction of the workless and idle, insinuating that it is a way of life only for those who choose it. Yet the reality couldn't be more different.

Gary is a really impoverished town; it's in industrial decay. There's low employment and things of that nature.

Schools alone are not to blame for underachievement. The breakdown of the family, poverty, and decaying cities with eroding tax bases have made a good public school education nearly impossible in many parts of the country.

I know what it's like to be on public assistance and to be unemployed. And I know what it's like to be evicted.

The wiping out of millions of homes took away Black and Brown wealth. It drove poverty, it drove unemployment, it drove people to food stamps.

The Caribbean is all Third World islands and it's very tough to raise the money for sports.

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

Those of us referred to food banks are the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognise that something has gone seriously wrong.

Many people assume that since New Jersey is a wealthy state with a high per capita income that a lot of these issues of poverty and hunger don't exist, and the fact is that they do.