Inequity Quotes

“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.”
― Frederick Douglass

“The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy. This shouldn't be surprising: One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary Black people.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body. The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is as whimsical and ahistorical as the White-supremacist idea that calling something racist is the primary form of racism. Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or material reality. Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial--like the popular strategy of suasion--is suicidal.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.

But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“Connections, like treasury bonds, are issued to every rich white person upon exiting the womb. Whenever one of them gets high and crashes their parents’ car, whenever they get busted for buying coke from an undercover, whenever they get caught messing with the wrong gangsters on vacation, they make a call, send a text, or whip out their AMEX.”
― Mateo Askaripour, Black Buck

“I am the voice of struggle and revolution.”
― Avijeet Das

My poetry is not mainstream. My stories are about struggle.

I am the voice of struggle and revolution. I represent the strugglers and fighters of the world. My words express anger and frustration against a cruel world.

The world will be ruined by the "rich and successful people." Amassing wealth seems to be the prerogative of these "rich and successful people." And they are bent on filling their coffers with more and more money at the cost of the environment and betterment of the world. The disparity between the haves and the have-nots have now grown to gargantuan proportions, and this disparity will spark revolutions in the coming days.

It is time the "rich and successful people" make amends.”
― Avijeet Das

“Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst.

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. From behind the ghetto walls they see glistening towers of glass and steel springing up almost overnight. They hear jet liners speeding over their heads at six hundred miles an hour. They hear of satellites streaking through outer space and revealing details of the moon.

Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. They look at these impressive buildings under construction and realize that almost certainly they cannot get those well-paying construction jobs, because building trade unions reserve them for whites only. They know that people who built the bridges, the mansions and docks of the South could build modern buildings if they were only given a chance for apprenticeship training. They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“And so being a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred and the defeated. Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan. Being a Negro in America means listening to suburban politicians talk eloquently against open housing while arguing in the same breath that they are not racists. It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodyness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness. It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.

After 348 years racial injustice is still the Negro’s burden and America’s shame.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Mom used to say many people waste their lives in a liminal no-man’s-land, stranded on a bridge between their tragic past and their uncertain future. The more they glance back, the more afraid they become to go forward. And there is, she’d told me, but one escape from that bridge. Live now, my darling Zo. That’s all we have anyway. The past is baggage lost at the airport; don’t present your claim check. The uncertain future is nothing but fear about things that will likely never come to pass.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“2,000 of the richest have more together than the bottom three and a half billion. That’s a level of inequality that any system should be deeply ashamed of.”
― Richard D. Wolff, The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

“Without question, there have been well-intentioned movements to improve access to this “freedom” (with various degrees of success), but such efforts have largely been about carving out space within the established system. This shuffling of the deck chairs might improve conditions marginally for some but ultimately results in little more than accommodating and perpetuating the very unjust and oppressive systems without addressing the root causes (see neo-liberalism).”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“As a person of color in America, you need to fly to reach the hallowed gates of wealth and mainstream success while others can just walk. "Good" is not good enough. You have to be exceptional, especially when you don't have the legacy admissions, the generational wealth, the mentors who look like you and come from your communities, and an entire system that benefits one skin color and gender at the detriment of others.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“The Whiteness doesn't want us to be American. But since it can't remove all of us, it will always find ways to dominate the rest of us and make our lives uncomfortable.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“She and Bub went to live with Pop in that crowded, musty flat on Seventh Avenue. She hunted for a job with a grim persistence that was finally rewarded, for two weeks later she went to work as a hand presser in a steam laundry. It was hot. The steam was unbearable. But she forced herself to go to night school—studying shorthand and typing and filing. Every time it seemed as though she couldn't possibly summon the energy to go on with the course, she would remind herself of all the people who had got somewhere in spite of the odds against them. She would think of the Chandlers and their young friends—'It's the richest damn country in the world.'

Mrs. Chandler wrote her a long letter and Jim forwarded it to her from Jamaica. 'Lutie dear: We haven't had a decent thing to eat since you left. And Little Henry misses you so much he's almost sick—' She didn't answer it. She had more problems than Mrs. Chandler and Little Henry had and they could always find somebody to solve theirs if they paid enough.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Mom,' he said, 'why do white people want colored people shining shoes?'

She turned toward him, completely at a loss as to what to say, for she had never been able to figure it out for herself. She looked down at her hands. They were brown and strong, the fingers were long and well-shaped. Perhaps because she was born with skin that color, she couldn't see anything wrong with it. She was used to it. Perhaps it was a shock just to look at skins that were dark if you were born with a skin that was white. Yet dark skins were smooth to the touch; they were warm from the blood that ran through the veins under the skin; they covered bodies that were just as well put together as the bodies that were covered with white skins. Even if it were a shock to look at people whose skins were dark, she had never been able to figure out why people with white skins hated people who had dark skins. It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled 'colored'; a package that called for certain kinds of jobs and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn't know what it was.

'I don't know, Bub,' she said finally. 'But it's for the same reason we can't live anywhere else but in places like this'—she indicated the cracked ceiling, the worn top of the set tub, and the narrow window, with a wave of the paring knife in her hand.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Morals are the luxury of the rich.”
― Christian Drerup

“You have to grab for happiness in places like this because there isn't enough to go around for everybody.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black

“And I grew up believing these myths of manifest destiny and exceptionalism, the idea that I could do or be anything that I ever dreamed of, and assumed it was true of everyone else if they only did right and tried hard.”
― D. L. Mayfield

“They begin to perceive that ours is a world where the notion that some people are less important than others has been allowed to take root, and grow until it buckles and cracks the foundations of our humanity. “How could they?” the gleaners exclaim, of us. “Why would they do such things? How can they just leave those people to starve? Why do they not listen when that one complains of disrespect? What does it mean that these ones have been assaulted and no one, no one, cares? Who treats other people like that?”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“One cannot overlook the number of young women and girls involved,' he pointed out.
'Well they do make up somewhat more than half the population.'
'Yes, and because women are often kept in a position of subservience, they may prove more sensitive to unspoken tensions and threats than men.'
I was so stunned by this statement that I came to a dead halt. Half a dozen steps on, he noticed that I was behind him. 'What?' he asked.
You did say you realised that you have a blind spot when it comes to women, but I hadn't thought...'
Indeed, I had not thought. I'd been so wrapped up in the turmoil of having lied to him about Mrs. Hudson, I had overlooked this bedrock truth about Sherlock Holmes: once the man's attention came to focus on an inequity, all his energies would go to setting it aright--even if the problem was one in his own self.”
― Laurie R. King, Castle Shade

“...we need to let go of this idea that we’re good people, and really try to focus on understanding how our privilege creates challenges for people in the workplace.”
― Michelle P. King

“Tackling inequality is actually every leader's job, it is the definition of leadership. And it’s also the ultimate privilege. So, to be able to remove barriers that you yourself never have to experience is the ultimate form of privilege, and it’s actually a requirement of every leader. Because if you want to advance women in your workplace, you cannot do that without knowing what the barriers are, and taking steps to remove them. So, by and large leaders just simply haven’t been leading when it comes to equality in workplaces, so we need them to lead, it’s an imperative in terms of advancing women, and also advancing men and creating environments where men can show up differently.”
― Michelle P. King

“I don't hate white people. I hate the whole world for letting what happened to us go on the way it did. You telling me hundreds of years of torture and couldn't nobody stop it? And ain't nobody want to rectify it? Hell yeah, damn right I'm mad and I'll be mad forever, until the day I die, and even then I want them to set my coffin on fire so I can be mad in the afterlife. Because what happened to our people deserves that kind of mad. And if won't nobody else feel it, I'll goddamn feel it enough for everybody. That's my liberation.”
― Cebo Campbell, Sky Full of Elephants

“In a survey of American educational institutions, Robert M. Hutchins, then President of the University of Chicago, developed the thesis that the character of our educational systems reflects the character of the society that sustains and engenders them. The society in this instance is one characterized by aggression, both individual and social, by a wide disparity of wealth, privilege, and opportunity, by materialistic values and standards, and by a rather confused and demoralized ideology. Our educational system is the inevitable progeny of its present society.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“Religion has invented that wonderful thing called charity. It is the most vicious and vulgar thing that we have done. Nature has provided us with a bounty. But we are individually responsible for the inequities of the world.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, Thought is Your Enemy: Mind-Shattering Conversations with the Man Called U.G.