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.
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.
Hence I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
Who is affected more when it's cold? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's hot? Poor people. Who is affected more when it's wet? Poor people. Who is most affected when the economy is bad? Poor people. Poor people are the most fragile.
(Farm workers) are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don't have any money or any food left for themselves.
America hasn't been able to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that police brutality is encoded in this country's DNA.
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