This Is What Inequality Looks Like Quotes

“Inequality, in fact, is a logical outcome of meritocracy. What the education system does when it selects, sorts, and hierarchizes, and when it gives its stamp of approval to those 'at the top,' is that it renders those who succeed through the system as legitimately deserving. Left implicit is that those at the bottom have failed to be deserving.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“low-income parents find themselves having to do this immensely difficult thing: they have to tell hteir kids to listen to them and yet also send them the message “don’t be like me.” It is difficult to exercise authority under these conditions. To have one’s parenting practices be unintelligible, unacknowledged, deemed less worthy, is a profound form of attack on the self, especially when being a parent is a central part of one’s identity.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“The respect I am accorded are conditional on my participation in society as an economically productive and relatively wealthy person. It has little to do with my inherent right to respect as a human being and member of this society.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“We who have the power to make choices disproportionately shape outcomes and limit options for people who don’t have the power to make choices. It follows that if we don’t share the power to make choices, we will never see a change to those things we say are bad or unacceptable to our society. When those of us who have the means maximize our own children’s and our own families’ advantages, we are contributing to strengthening norms about achievement, success/failure, that undermine our fellow citizens’ well-being.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Our national discourse emphasizes sacrifice, community, greater good. Our institutions, our everyday lives—they regulate and compel individualism, competition, self-centeredness.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Low-income parents do not necessarily make more ‘bad choices’ than parents with higher income, but more of their practices turn out to have negative outcomes. It is more accurate to say that they have bad options for managing the need for money and the need of their kids for care”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“In sociological literature, meritocracy is widely recognized as a system for sorting, selecting, and then differentially rewarding people; it is a system for legitimizing the process and outcomes of sorting, based on narrow notions of what is worth rewarding and what is not. And it works well when there is, what Pierre Bourdieu referred to as “misrecognition.” Misrecognition happens when we think that a system is based on a certain set of principles when it really works on the basis of another, when we think it rewards each individual’s hard work when in reality it rewards economic and cultural capital passed on from parents to children.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“We make meaning through our everyday lives--in small activities and through relationships. These are moments of potential beauty. They are the acts that make us human. The inclination by class-privileged women and men to reject the domestic realm because we see and know that it is the sphere of less power--it is an inclination that gives up too much and we must claw it back. In the process, we must also work to expand the space for everyone to meet their needs--make real choices, partake in the mundane, live lives, be human. To do this, we need reasonable employment conditions across the class spectrum and social policies that are not class-biased but genuinely supportive of all families.

No one should have to be super in order to be human.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“There is insufficient attention to the fact that reward and punishment systems are not neutral. Not all qualities, skills, and capacities are equally valued in our society. Inadequate thought is given to the ways in which some of us set the standards against which others are measured.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“They allow us to feel like we belong to the groups we care about, that we are rooted in, and that we need respect, acceptance and love from. As the title of (Allison) Pugh’s book suggests – we long for things because we long to belong.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“What we do and do not do are shaped by our sense of how others are — shared understandings of right and wrong, good and bad, valuable and worthless. The pathways and practices we end up taking are rendered meaningful by shared scripts and narratives that permeate our society.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“We make meaning through our everyday lives - in small activities and through relationships. These are moments of potential beauty. They are the acts that make us human.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“It is disingenuous to claim that all tracks are good and all paths valued; if this were the case, and if Singaporeans actually believe this, tuition centers would be out of business.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“for higher-class parents, children are ‘projects.’ They have tightly scheduled lives and coordinated activities; high-income parents spend significant time and energy thinking about how to fulfill their kids’ ‘potentials.’ For the working class and poor, Lareau argues, parenting is more about ‘the accomplishment of natural growth.’ Top priorities in these families are safety and health.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Mobility and immobility are at once spatial and temporal—they are about movement through places and also changes over time.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“There will be times we feel all is futile and we are powerless. There will be days when we have opportunities and years when we continually slam ourselves against shut doors. We must remind each other then that we are not alone. We act because we have to and we act because, together, we can create something new, something else.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Memories sustain us — they tell us who we are and to whom we’re connected.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Economic growth and wealth is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“The invocation of motivation, of mindsets, of agency—they are powerful distractions from looking at poverty as linked to inequality.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“People sitting in positions of authority are powerful not because they feel empowered but because they have power. Their feelings of empowerment are an outcome of their actual ownership of power, not the cause.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“What we frequently think of as wants, in specific contexts, are needs. They are, as the sociologist Allison Pugh’s work shows, dignity needs. They allow us to feel like we belong to the groups we care about, that we are rooted in, and that we need respect, acceptance and love from.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“as long as access to public goods varies greatly in terms of affordability, and affordability in turn is heavily dependent on one’s position in the capitalist economy, one’s advantage or disadvantage from market participation maps onto their interactions with public goods”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Differentiation, on the other hand, pushes us to think of the process in more productive terms. It brings attention to the fact that what is also happening is an act of creating categories and rendering them meaningful. The concept reminds us that social categories do not sprout in nature and that once created, they are not simply bureaucratic labels but also become crucial parts of people’s identities.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“The right to family cannot be limited to family as a mere economic unit. Given the centrality of the family for well-being in this society, we should have the right not just to form families, but to give and receive care, and to build meaningful and dignified lives together.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Policies cannot and probably should not anticipate all irrationalities and breakdowns in individual families. Nonetheless, given the heavy presumption in the delivery of public goods that ‘family is the first line of support,’ more must be done to ensure that a reasonable family life—which is more than just the formation of a family unit—is not a class privilege.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“If people are always trying to give you advice about your parenting, often without knowing much about how you parent, you would probably also feel like no one thinks you are a worthy parent.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“When you are parenting as a person whose path is not seen as admirable by conventional standards, as someone who is not perceived as a success in your social world, your authority is inevitably suspect.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“Parenting is not merely about keeping children alive. While children above a certain age no longer need constant supervision, family relationships make a big difference to parents’ and children’s well-being.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“middle-class parents hold sway over their teenage children partly through circumstance. Their financial dependence on parents, their use of personal spaces in their homes, their scheduled activities are all conditions that grant parents continued access to influence over their everyday lives.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

“These are difficult because older kids are not like younger ones: they are able to go about their own everyday lives more independently than young children, and they are more aware of the world beyond their families. These two things are exactly the reasons low-income parents struggle more than their higher-income counterparts.”
― You Yenn Teo, This Is What Inequality Looks Like