Inequality Awareness Quotes

Though the rich of this earth find no difficulty in creating misery, they can't bear to see it.

The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.

I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.

It's easy to look at South Central and say, 'That's a bad place,' and it's easy to look at Beverly Hills and say, 'It will be a cakewalk,' but it just exposed me to a different set of problems. Both sides relate to each other more than they think.

Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

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.

Occupy provided me a lens through which to see systemic discrimination.

Full stomachs don't believe empty ones.

We rushed to Haiti. We Adopt in Asia. We empathize with Africa. But struggle to humanize our struggles here in the states.

When you’re a housekeeper’s daughter, you see the world through a half-open door.

At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.

I guess I strongly feel that we cannot pretend that the Third World is not part of our world. We cannot say 'OK, there's that problem over there, let's just close our eyes' - we cannot do that.

When you look at a guy like a Jay-Z or look at a guy like a Nas, you don't necessarily qualify them as conscious rap purely, although they are extremely conscious of the social inequities that prevail.

Diversity on the bench is critical. As practitioners, you need judges who 'get it!' We need judges who understand what discrimination feels like. We need judges who understand what inequality feels like. We need judges who understand the subtleties of unfair treatment and who are willing to call it out when they see it!

Privilege is a headache, that you don't know that you don't have.

The biggest thing is we need to stop acting like racism don't exist.