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"There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small. One thinks of Serena Williams, whose dominance and stunning achievements can't, in and of themselves, ensure equal access to tennis facilities for young black girls. The gate is open and yet so very far away."
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Exlpore more Inequality quotes
"It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals."
"Some people sit at life' banquet table while others serve them."
"In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases."
"Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation."
"When the rich and the powerful rise they leave the powerless and the poor without possibility."
"How unjust then to meet that person you love, and be kept away from them only because ones bed is made of hay , and the other, feathers."
"The Fed's policies have been an unqualified success for financiers and an abject failure for the bottom 99.5% who have to work for a living."
"Modern married women do not fare better in life than their single counterparts. Married women in America do not live longer than single women; married women do not accumulate as much wealth as single women (you take a 7 percent pay cut, on average, just for getting hitched); married women do not thrive in their careers to the extent single women do; married women are significantly less healthy than single women; married women are more likely to suffer from depression than single women; and married women are more likely to die a violent death than single women-usually at the hands of a husband, which raises the grim reality that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous person in the average woman's life is her own man."
"The system that had grown up in most states is that wealthy districts with an affluent population can afford to spend a lot more on their public school systems than the poorer districts."
"A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality."
"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."
"The Struggle is in your name, Samori - you were named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp."
"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own."
"Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded - that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures - that was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out."
"The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half."
"Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner."
"On the last day of her visit I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child, and having watched you grow I know that nothing could possibly be more precious to her. She said to me, 'You take care of my daughter.'When she got out of the car my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you and then there was after and in this after you were the god I'd never had. I submitted before your needs and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you."
"America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values."
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