Many unhoused people work full time but earn starvation, unlivable wages. Some struggle to access mental health services or substance use treatment, making earning a consistent and stable wage nearly impossible.
Cori BushRead
Being unhoused in America must no longer be viewed as an individual shortcoming, but rather as an unacceptable, life-threatening policy failure.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that homelessness should not be seen as a personal failure, but as a systemic issue that needs urgent attention.
Cori Bush highlights the importance of viewing homelessness as a consequence of societal and policy failures rather than a result of individual shortcomings. This perspective calls for a collective responsibility to address the underlying causes of homelessness and implement effective solutions to ensure the safety and dignity of all individuals.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation about social justice reforms.
Many unhoused people work full time but earn starvation, unlivable wages. Some struggle to access mental health services or substance use treatment, making earning a consistent and stable wage nearly impossible.
The death penalty is an inhumane punishment that disproportionately violates the human rights of Black, brown, indigenous, and other marginalized people.
By expanding the legal authority of law enforcement agencies - without addressing the infiltration of white supremacy within law enforcement - we are expanding the capacity of white supremacy itself.
We don't live in a world that nurtures and cares for Black girls like me. And if the world doesn't care about a Black girl like me, then what will happen to our Black babies who grow up to become Black children and Black adults?
This stereotype that Black and brown boys and girls are dangerous or threatening has normalized systems of trauma: the cradle to prison pipeline, foster care, youth detention, and being tried and sentenced as adults. We treat trauma with more trauma.
We treat Black and brown kids who can't vote yet, can't join the military, can't rent a car or even buy a lottery ticket - like adults in our criminal legal system. We deprive them of their joy and their youth. Children who deserve to live rich and abundant lives.
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.
The thirst for liberation and equality can never come at the expense of dehumanizing other marginalized groups - especially at a time when hate crimes against Jews have increased significantly.
When you ask people to name victims of police brutality, for the most part, nobody will give you a woman's name.
The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.
I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.
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