#injustice

Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a "good" black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all. ↗

— Michelle Alexander

#injustice #jim-crow #racism #age

Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#beauty #social-injustice #ugliness #art

It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world. ↗

— Vincent A. Gallagher

#humanity #injustice #suffering #courage

What, other than injustice, could be the reason that the displaced citizens of New Orleans cannot be accommodated by the richest nation in the world? ↗

— Wynton Marsalis

#cannot #citizens #could #displaced #injustice

The fact that he didn't get credit for a while is more the story of social injustice. But his own spirit wasn't driven by that, and wasn't dependent upon that. He just wished he had the cash to go to medical school. ↗

— Mary Stuart Masterson

#credit #dependent #driven #fact #get

Voting to go on strike is not a decision working people take lightly and is always accompanied by a strong sense of injustice at work. The impact of losing a day's pay is significant, not least for those in the lowest paid jobs who are already on the tightest budgets. ↗

— Frances O'Grady

#already #always #budgets #day #decision

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors. ↗

— Emile M. Cioran

#each #generation #injustice #predecessors #progress

If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters. ↗

— Helen Clark

#fosters #grow #heightened #injustice #left

There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness. ↗

— Eldridge Cleaver

#calamity #consequent #defended #equals #follows

When the whole world has their eyes on you, if you say something that doesn't truly come from your spirit and your soul, or if you wear something that doesn't come from your spirit and your soul, it's an injustice to your position. And so, I'm really myself every single day and I do it because I know my fans would want me to. ↗

— Lady Gaga

#come #day #every #every single day #eyes