Scott > Scott's Quotes

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“It is worth distilling this message in order to fully appreciate the irony. The story was that after decades of New Deal–era federal subsidies had created a white middle class, reinforced a segregated black underclass, and created cyclic poverty that made it difficult for many to find shelter and food without government aid, it was black people who were being unjustly enriched by the overly generous hand of the state.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Ultimately, the FHA was an empty promise. The act allowed the country to publicly denounce segregation while never actually pursuing integration.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“In Where Do We Go from Here, King had said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“Even with the bundling and splitting of tranches, Wall Street needed more mortgage borrowers, so it created the subprime market. These were loans to borrowers who did not meet the underwriting standards set forth by the GSEs, or “prime” loans. Subprime borrowers were riskier borrowers, either because they had fewer assets, lower credit score, or lower incomes. But in finance, higher risk is rewarded with higher yield, so mortgage brokers made even higher premiums from subprime loans.”
― Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Racist police, no matter what their rank, have to be weeded from every department and not allowed to work in law enforcement again anywhere.”
― Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Black Cop's Kid: An Essay

“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