Scott

“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

“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

“The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.”
― Matt Taibbi, I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

“We might want to apply the following short litmus tests to any policy proposal: does the program require some collective sacrifice or does it place the burden of closing the wealth gap entirely on the black community? If the latter, this is a cop-out that refuses to acknowledge that the black community did not create the problem in the first place.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap