Systemic Barriers Quotes

Black people in America, people from the struggle, immigrants, it's no generational wealth that we are attached to, so we are tasked to create - in one generation - closing the gap. That's why we so Doomsday about getting to the check: 'cause it's life or death for real.

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

A Negro woman has the same kind of problems as other women, but she can't take the same things for granted.

There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.

Little by little, the U.S. has allowed questionable domestic policies to chip away at the only hope poor students have at a better future. The Right Wing loves to distract voters from these realities by making it seem as though the poor remain so because they lack the work ethic necessary to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps.'

I can be lazy, don't get me wrong. But it's not laziness that's holding me back, it's the system where I don't fit in.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

People who had been treated inhumanly, not given a chance to secure any foot on any ladder - and all the social mores were suddenly abandoned.

You know, some people got no choice, and they can never find a voice, to talk with that they can even call their own. So the first thing that they see, that allows them the right to be, why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck.

I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need.

As blacks, all we got is sports and entertainment. That's the only way out the hood sometimes.

I know a lot of people who are weak, who are in a perpetual cycle of poverty and being locked up. There are guys from my neighborhood who are in jail or who are dead. It does take a certain strength to know your environment and say, 'I can grow beyond it.'

Why should I leave Ruleville, and why should I leave Mississippi? I go to the big city, and with the kind of education they give us in Mississippi, I got problems. I'd wind up in a soup line there.

In community after community, there are unemployment rates among young African-Americans of 30 to 40 percent. Thirty to 40 percent! Kids have no jobs, they have no future. That is an issue that has got to be dealt with simultaneously as we deal with police brutality, voter suppression and the other attacks that are taking place on the African-American community.

If life were like a competitive race, some people would be given a flying start and others would line up with weights tied to their ankles.

I had a very dear friend of mine, ton of potential, and he fell ill with bipolar disorder. And he was put in the penal system. And that was just adding fuel to the fire. He got worse. He came out and he's never been the same since. He can't seem to get his life back. And this is a man who could have had Hollywood in the palm of his hand. A lot of my inspiration and aspirations for wanting to be an actor, I owe to him. Between the disorder and him being put in jail, it just snuffed all of that away from him.

I'm enormously sympathetic to talented people who have few roles to choose from.

To me, there's so much talent in the world that's locked out for the wrong reasons, whether it's innovators at the highest end where we need to change the regulation systems, or whether it's the talented people who work here who the bureaucracy's holding back, or the amazing American people.

I've always been the underdog, and I've always had to work much harder than the next person just to get a look. But I feel like that's Black people as a whole, to be honest with you. We have to do so much more and work so much harder to get certain kinds of looks within this industry.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

There have always been women who were successful against the odds. Now we need to change the odds so more women can be successful.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? … Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.

I have a lot of rage about things that didn't happen to me, tied up with watching an immigrant, working-class father struggle to make his way through the world - and seeing how society was modeled to keep him in his place.

Who is the enemy? Who is holding back more rapid movement to the better society that is reasonable and possible with available resources?...Evil, stupidity, apathy, the 'system' are not the enemy...The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people...In short, the enemy is strong natural servants who have the potential to lead but do not lead, or who choose to follow a non-servant.

Even talking about change can be threatening to entrenched interests...Careers in the Pentagon, the board room, or the halls of Congress are not advanced by creating the disruptions that go with real change, so there are very few voices willing to speak up for the future and move beyond rhetoric to make serious choices.