Clare-Hope Ashitey Quotes

A fair observer only has to ask: If there is violence, who profits?

Law enforcement's biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the 'paddy wagon.' The Irish had tough times, but little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

Never mind a world that can't see past brutality.

My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do.

I refuse to bring my son up in a world corrupt as it is now.

We always see abhorrent behavior and say why, but then we get mad when somebody tries to answer.

I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they're normal and can't be changed. A lot of what I write about is, 'Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn't need to be, and that's why it's so offensive.' Things should be better.

If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

You face racism in small and large ways.

I am quite surprised, that with all my work, and some of it is very, very good, that nobody talks about The Miracle Worker. We're talking about Mrs. Robinson. I understand the world... I'm just a little dismayed that people aren't beyond it yet.

It is rather hard to be accused of shiftlessness and idleness when the accuser closes the avenue of labour and industrial pursuits to us.

The rule of law gains credibility when it is seen as fair. America has a problem in this regard.... There is a bigger problem than we all want to admit.

The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the poor, and almost all evils to which society is subject, to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return

As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they clean, whose sewers they dig, yet upon which they must not stand too long lest the policeman bid them "move on"; as long as they go from factory to factory, begging for the opportunity to be a slave, receiving the insults of bosses and foremen, getting the old "no," the old shake of the head, in these factories they built, whose machines they wrought; so long as they consent to herd like cattle, in the cities, driven year after year, more and more, off the mortgaged land, the land they cleared, fertilized, cultivated, rendered of value; so long as they stand shivering, gazing thro' plate glass windows at overcoats, which they made, but cannot buy, starving in the midst of food they produced but cannot have; so long as they continue to do these things vaguely relying upon some power outside themselves, be it god, or priest, or politician, or employer, or charitable society, to remedy matters, so long deliverance will be delayed.

It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

The arguments given by my predecessors in support of the ban on same sex marriage are the same arguments that were given to ban interracial marriage.

The more we examine the actual course of affairs, the more we are amazed at the unnecessary suffering that has been inflicted upon the people. No generalities about natural law or inevitable development can blind us to the fact, that the progress in which we believe has been won at the expense of much injustice and wrong, which was not inevitable.

As a black man, so often you grow up suppressing your emotions and sensitivity.

Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight.

At the root of any societal issue is human truth, especially those truths we find hard to confront.

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.