Structural Inequality Quotes

“There's a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there's another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can't prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.' Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn't preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more rigorous conditions.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“Elites do often make the environment worse and block solutions, but to blame the problem of elite capture entirely on their moral successes and failures is to confuse effect for cause. The true problem lies in the system itself, the built environment and rules of interaction that produced the elites in the first place.”
― olufemi o. taiwo, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics

“The politics of whiteness transcends the colour of anyone's skin. It is an occupying force in the mind. It is a political ideology that is concerned with maintaining power through domination and exclusion. Anyone can buy into it, just like anyone can choose to challenge it. [...] Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack of them as a white person are probably part of the problem.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“There is an enormous difference between seeing people as the victims of innate shortcomings and seeing them as the victims of structural violence. Indeed, it is likely that the struggle for rights is undermined whenever the history of unequal chances, and of oppression, is erased or distorted.”
― Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor

“Shalom is meant to be both personal (emphasizing our relationships with others) and structural (replacing systems where shalom has been broken or which produce broken shalom, such as war-or greed-driven economic systems). In shalom, the old structures and systems are replaced with new structures and new systems.”
― Randy S. Woodley

“You don't fix unfairness with more unfairness; you don't get a fair go by denying one to someone else. You get a fair go by organising; by standing alongside everyone else who's in the same situation and insisting on rules that ensure fairness.”
― Sally McManus, On Fairness

“The pandemic and the growth in technology have compounded the evolution of more polarized views. We have seen an uptick in the encroachment of each other’s boundaries, discrimination, and outright violence. But we don’t just get to blame the new kids on the block. We already had these issues to begin with, and clearly the pandemic hit certain communities harder than others, communities that were already suffering long before the pandemic.”
― Chris Warren-Dickins, Beyond Your Confines: The key to free your mind