Scott

“political backlash has resulted in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country passing laws to make voting more difficult for minority voters. Punishment for raising your voice is to silence that voice.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Black Cop's Kid: An Essay

“On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap. On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect toward authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair.”
― Matt Taibbi, I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

“To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.”
― Matt Taibbi, I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

“For black families, each dollar creates only sixty-nine cents in total wealth.25 This is why the wealth gap between blacks and whites can continue to grow even when de jure discrimination ended decades ago.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap