Social Strata Quotes

“Just because you have stolen someone's heart, luckily owned and occupied as a home, doesn't give you the audacity to enforce hurtful policies.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“I thought about black women and wondered how we got to be the way we were. In our country, white men were always in superior positions; after them came white women, then black men, then black women, who were historically on the bottom stratum.

How did it happen that we could nurse a nation of strangers, be maids to multitudes of people who scorned us, and still walk with some majesty and stand with a degree of pride?”
― Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up to Heaven

“For even though the rest of the city--no, the rest of the country--starved and searched fruitlessly for work and slept in a humpy in the park, society's finest could still squander their money however they saw fit.

The unemployed, they would say, were lazy. If they worked harder, they'd do as well as Mr. Harry Moneypants was doing, who'd earned his vast fortune by having the foresightedness of selecting rich parents, who had, in their time, also cleverly selected rich parents.”
― Justine Larbalestier, Razorhurst

“When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“...our genteel lifestyle seemed guaranteed for all eternity by the availability of cheap labor.”
― Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni