Ayanna Pressley Quotes

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

I was born on an island with 96 percent of the people black. But all the power and the economy was in the hands of white people who only formed four per cent.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

Reckless capitalism kills black people.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.

The poor and minorities are disproportionately both crime's perpetrators and its victims. People are saddened when this happens but not surprised.

I think we've made tremendous progress on racism. We've even made progress on war. We've made almost no progress on poverty.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

The reason why you were allowed to get away with that in the '60s and '70s is because this country's racist administrative policies were such that rich white kids were getting exemptions. I said no exemptions.

The issue of wealth inequality is ... the great moral issue of our time.

Visible minorities lead in education but trail in income.

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solution to large collective problems, because those problems [to the have’s] no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy/

… white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture (of private discrimination and segregation) that has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

African American Communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been before. Ever, ever, ever.

No harm is done by the possession of Luxury by some people if only at the same time EVERYBODY HAS ENOUGH. The wrong incurred by the rich toward the poor lies solely in the fact that while they revel, the poor starve