The basis for sustainable progress is legal protections grounded in an awareness of how identity has been used to deny opportunity.
Interpretation
Sustainable progress requires legal protections that recognize and address systemic discrimination based on identity.
This quote by Stacey Abrams emphasizes that in order to achieve lasting progress in society, it is essential to implement legal safeguards that are informed by an understanding of how various aspects of identity, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, have historically been exploited to limit access to opportunities. Legal protections serve as a foundation to ensure equality and promote fairness, thus fostering an inclusive environment for all individuals to thrive.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about social justice reforms during a community rally.
I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.
I do not Google myself, I do not read comments, and I barely look myself in the eye when I look in the mirror.
My being a black woman is not a deficit. It is a strength. Because I could not be where I am had I not overcome so many other barriers. Which means you know I'm relentless, you know I'm persistent, and you know I'm smart.
I like to solve problems. I know it is a skill set, but it's also an obligation. I grew up with parents who believe that you don't simply complain: you try to find solutions and fix what's in front of you.
Here in Georgia, we continue to grapple with our own vestiges of hate. The image carved into Stone Mountain, like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant reminders of racism, intolerance, and division.
To achieve our goals of educating bold and ambitious children, we must invest in enriching, quality early child care and learning.
The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.
The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nationβs capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.
Their suffering is intense, widespread, expanding, systematic and socially sanctioned. And the victims are unable to organize in defence of their own interests.
Being a woman, we talk about equal pay all the time. We're not talking about if you're black or if you are Latina. I would like to get back to that and improving the relationship between the police community and the community of color. I don't know exactly all the right things to say, but I want to engage in that conversation.
It is devastating that jail is seen as a rite of passage for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, part of the natural order of things. It is an outrage that there is an attitude that this is normal. This is not normal. We can't shrug our shoulders and say this is just a 'fact of life' in remote Australia.
When you look at the wealth gap - the racial wealth gap - all of that is very much connected to housing.
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