Lupe Fiasco Quotes

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?

There's not a lot of hope coming from the inner city.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

The poor prey on one another because their lives offer no hope and communicate the tragic message to these human beings that they have no possibility to attain a decent standard of living.

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

Poverty is everyone's problem. It cuts across any line you can name: age, race, social, geographic or religious. Whether you are black or white; rich, middle-class or poor, we are ALL touched by poverty.

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

To me poverty, mental health, and addictions don't sound like criminal justice problems. They sound to me like a social justice problem.

I was born outraged. I was born without, knowing my people were not counted, not included, not centered. I struggled through low-resourced schools, communities, and housing projects.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

A large part of the problem, is that young people are being born into the world and growing up without much hope. And so, they become murderers, they become suicide bombers.

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

Disparity is Australia's worst social problem. Thousands of lives are slowly being crushed, while billions are wasted on thousands of little initiatives trying to 'close the gap.'

I think that there always have been and always will be at least two Americas - the poor America, the second America, tends to be in the shadows. Sometimes it's an America of people in a ghetto of color, sometimes it's an economic ghetto, but definitely there is a parallel America which people in the dominant America prefer to ignore if they can.

I can't be calm when I drive through sections of Atlanta that look more like Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, than America.

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

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.

I suspect most politicians feel overwhelmed because people's lives are a real struggle, full of unhappiness, and you would probably feel powerless to do anything about it.